[CentOS] cfengine vs. puppet

[James Hogarth]

On 27 August 2010 19:30, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/27/2010 1:14 PM, James Hogarth wrote:
>>
>> Please only comment on stuff you have genuine *current* knowledge of
>> and not something you dabbled in a year ago... technology changes
>> quickly especially in a product under heavy and active development.
>
> Are wild changes in the span of a year really something you want to see
> in a system that is supposed to be managing your configurations for you?
>   And if you accept the fact that technology changes quickly, do you
> want to install a system that locks you in to one or only a few
> distributions?
>

Indeed these are genuine questions that should be asked in the process
of evaluating a set of requirements.

For myself we are a heavy CentOS house and will be for at least the
foreseeable future - plans are already underway to start testing our
apps on RHEL6 beta in preparation for CentOS6.

As for 'wild changes' I personally have no problem using a product
under development so long as data is carried forwards with no point of
a 'format' change requiring a rebuild of data. At least with an active
product suggests made or code contributions get looked at quickly ^^

Once the debian support is in place then as a product it opens up the
field very swiftly for distribution changes.... and besides we often
see huge changes in the space of just a year as we all know.... look
at SPICE, KVM, ext4, btrfs, openjdk to name but a few that either
didn't exist a year ago or have improved massively over the course of
a year and anyone would be insane to be using releases from that far
ago versus currently supported revisions in your preferred OS. Some of
these technologies have gone from general talk to production ready and
supported by Redhat, Canonical and others over that timespan.

At any rate I stand by my position that in tech if you are going to
put an opinion piece out on a mailing list, a blog or another medium
it should be relevant to the current situation and not something you
tried a year ago and didn't work out great so you advise others to
steer clear a year later without checking to see what progress, if
any, has been made in that area.


James