I have used cfengine2 extensively, but not cfengine3. I've only read about cfengine3. cfengine2 is a simple and effective mechanism for managing systems. How

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.