Hi folks,

I've watched the project for a couple of years now and done some work with it.  
I'm grateful many of you took the time to get SSG where it's at. Recently I 
came across chef.io's Inspec and I thought hey, this seems to solve alot of the 
engineering challenges the SSG project seems to have, especially with 
multi-distro support. 
Github: https://github.com/chef/inspec
Product: https://www.chef.io/inspec/

Here are some of the benefits my eyes see:

* Content is centralized (less mutli-file editing for the same tests aka less 
XMHell :-)
* Content is encouraged to be less distribution specific but allowed to be as 
specific as it needs, and this is encouraged inside a module, meaning less 
versions are floating around in the codebase
* Declarative/Programmatic as opposed to Declaritive/document oriented - I'd 
say with the later case has led to somewhat awkward and hard write tests, in 
some cases
* Can test active configuration as well as configuration file state
* Looks significantly less verbose - as in saving 10x lines of sourcecode (not 
counting XML output) and developer productivity would be much higher
* and as a possible benefit, I wouldn't be surprised if tests ran much faster - 
though I have done no extensive tests to show this.

Most importantly I believe inspec could pave the way to all distros working off 
of a common and smaller codebase than the existing SSG implementation and be 
far less maintenance burden and as such I wanted to raise awareness and get a 
topic going on the ML.

Inspec doesn't seem compatible out right with openscap (or maybe it is - they 
have bidirectional oval/xccdf consumers/emitters), but it IS aiming to replace 
OVAL/XCCDF as something more sane and just plain old better for the tasks.  
They also have tools for running it without scap tools involved of course so it 
doesn't have to lean on openscap et al, but for some people being seperate from 
SCAP tools is going to be a con and not a pro.
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