Whilst I really like the concept of an open marketplace for plugins providing functionality, once you have decided upon a set of plugins for a production implementation you really don't want to change them.
In a properly managed production environment it would be prudent to have a failover server which should be identical in configuration (incl plugins) so that the failover is as simple as possible.
Furthermore, in a properly managed environment you would also have test and development servers to enable the development of content, procedures and the like.
So, my question is this..
Does there exist a mechanism or strategy for the managing of plugins to enable the swift building of a dev/test server so that it is identical in configuration without having to MANUALLY install all the plugins one by one ?
The reason I ask is that I am faced with this task regularly when creating/destroying test VM's and it is really beginning to annoy me !
Thanks for any input ;-)