Hi.
A little follow-up on this topic after OsmoDevCon. I've stumbled upon following project http://www.clicon.org/
From a quick glance over their tutorial at http://www.clicon.org/clicon_tutorial.pdf
it seems to fulfill almost all the properties discussed at OsmoDevCon: * autogeneration of cli and conf from single source * transactions support * both human-oriented cli and machine-oriented protocol from a single source
Added bonus is that it's available under GPL (dual-license actually): https://github.com/clicon/clicon
The only downside I see so far (besides the sheer amount of work for migration) is that this project is not widely used (yet?). Another thing I have not understood without digging further is how to apply some configs/commands in runtime without restarting the backend (OsmoBSC, OsmoMSC etc).
All-in-all it seems like smth definitely worth looking into.