Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On 12/22/06, David Douthitt <ssrat@xxxxxxxxx> 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
