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I'm curious about this as well. Does anyone have any experience with this? It would be interesting to hear someone's opinion since CFEngine seems to have been a

• lusis 15y ago
  CFEngine is the "granddaddy" of configuration management. It's been around something like 17 years at this point. CFEngine spawned Puppet spawned Chef (rougly speaking) I never got involved with BCfg2 or lcfg so I don't remember the history behind.
• Goladus 15y ago
  I have used cfengine2 extensively, but not cfengine3. I've only read about cfengine3. cfengine2 is a simple and effective mechanism for managing systems. However, cfengine2 has some issues. It has limited facilities for abstraction, resulting in a lot of code duplication. It has no built-in template engine, meaning that if you need to assemble a file based on various conditions you have to cobble it together with pattern matching and line-insertion. It's pretty easy to screw this up and lose idempotency. There's a 30-package-install limit per cfagent run, which fails silently. This is very annoying and requires some hacks to circumvent. Also, in cfengine2 you have a configuration file that's basically <classname> : <list of hosts...>. If you approach more in terms of <hostname>: <list of classes>, it's a minor inconvenience. Cfengine3 addresses some of these issues, but I haven't used it much so can't really give it a fair review.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• leoc 15y ago
  CFEngine's current promise-theory-based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_theory architecture is much more recent, though.