cfengine overview - pros and cons

[David Douthitt]

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On 12/22/06, David Douthitt <ssrat at ticon.net> wrote:
>> I've used cfengine in a production environment, and found it to be very
>> useful and powerful.  I'll just list the features (pro and con) below.
>> CONS
>> ----
>> * Documentation - comprehensive but can be hard to know where to start
>> with new installations
>> * Configuration is unlike anything you've ever seen
>> * The "editfiles" section of the configuration is also unlike anything
>> you've ever seen - and is different than any other configuration section
>
> Actually almost every section has its own variants of the syntax.
The syntax is at least visually and apparently similar and nearly 
consistent, though EditFiles is completely unusual.
> The second con is that this is a research project for the author and
> not much else.. this can make dealing with problems a bit of a
> headache when he has completely theoretical issues he wants to try
> out.
I've heard this mentioned before, but I don't really see it.  As one 
reads the documentation it also becomes apparent that the author is a 
campus system administrator (in some fashion), and has to deal with 
system administration problems as well as anyone.

My thought was that the EditFiles sections begs for a complete miniature 
language of its own (like awk or lua or guile) but provides nothing of 
the sort, and does not provide a consistent language at all.

The other mentioned "one-off" pro for puppet is a cfengine FAQ, but the 
usual answer is: don't create "one-off" syntax settings; define the 
*state* to be attained and let the system maintain the state.

-- 
David Douthitt
HP-UX, Unixware, Linux, FreeBSD
RHCE, SCSA, Linux+, LPIC-1
http://www.lulu.com/ssrat