The March snapshot release of CFEngine Community and Enterprise has just hit our webservers. The releases are called 3.5 Beta1 and 3.1 Beta1, respectively, and just as last month: this is work in progress.
Community
Some low level changes have been introduced. It is now possible to have empty lists in policies, there is no need to use “cf_null” anymore.
We have continued our architectural work and we have changed FatalError for other less problematics error conditions along the code. This allows us to have a better error handling than what we used to have.
The parser and the evaluator are under major work, and in this release you will have the opportunity of testing the improvements.
As well we have fixed a few crashes and other bugs.
Enterprise
We have continued working on Hub Diagnostics, adding more measurements and making sure that we get the right information to diagnose potential problems.
For the mission portal we have modified the navigation tree, adding the possibility of creating custom trees and sharing them between users.
In our quest to make a more user friendly product we have started to move functionality around so people needs to use less executables. We have moved the query functionality from cf-runagent to cf-hub in order to keep all the querying functionality in one place.
Packaging
We heard your problems about too many packages and too many combinations and we decided to do something about it. We now have only 4 packages for clients:
- 32 bits for .deb systems
- 64 bits for .deb systems
- 32 bits for .rpm systems
- 64 bits for .rpm systems
Our enterprise customers will also find that the packages have a new and simpler name scheme. Agent packages will be called cfengine-enterprise-agent-<version>-<arch>.
We are working on a similar solution for enterprise hub packages, although that is still work in progress.
Get it while it’s hot!
Customers find the packages in a subdirectory “alpha_releases(unstable)” in their download area on cfengine.com. If you are not a customer, but want to evaluate this release, please sign up here to download a free version of CFEngine Enterprise. Once registered, you will have access to the latest stable release as well as to this monthly snapshot release. These free releases can be used to manage up the 25 nodes.
Community users can clone our github repository - check out tag 3.5.0b1 - and there are also packages available here. A big shout-out to all community contributers - your improvements to the code and to our policies and promise libraries are again much appreciated :)
