System Management Tools and versions

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 17:29, Jeff Sheltren <jeff at osuosl.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Michael Stahnke <mastahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm not sure it's upstream hurting  users.  EPEL won't move the
>> version of cfengine or puppet (although we have moved puppet in the
>> past) for the EL4/5 systems.  Thus the choice is either get the latest
>> from epel and rebuild the latest on the older systems, or the opposite
>> try and build the old package on the newer EL version.  Either way,
>> it's a dis-service to everybody involved because the packages are not
>> in step with each other across distros.  This often leads to people
>> complaining about EPEL and then rolling their own packages or tarball
>> or gem installations into their environment.
>>
>> The reason EPEL normally doesn't move these packages is that they
>> often times do introduce API/ABI breakage, so I'm not sure what the
>> best answer is, but I know I would still want all of my servers to be
>> managed through the same policies and at the same client version so I
>> have the same features available to everything inside my
>> infrastructure.
>>
>> stahnma
>>
>
> In the case of cfengine, v2 vs. v3:  v2 is no longer supported at all
> from upstream.  However, I'm pretty sure that v2 clients will work
> fine with a v3 server (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
> Because v2 is no longer supported upstream I'm hard pressed to find a
> reason to support it in EPEL6 onwards.

No they are completely different in the same way that usually puppet
breaks support. A v2 box is not going to understand 'promises' or
other syntax.  I doubt very much v2 will get any more support.
Cfengine 3 is where Mark Burgess is wanting to get corporate support
as he has a business behind it. The C2 code is a mess.. listening to
Luke Kanies it was the reason that he didn't fork it but just went
with a fresh start with puppet.



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines