We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.8.0 non-LTS beta is now ready for testing! The established CFEngine release schedule shows that the 3.8.0 final version is due before January 2016, so it’s time to test and fix any remaining issues. Please note that this is a non-LTS release, which means that it is maintained for 6 months from the release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers, but packages are available for testing.
Changes and improvements
3.8 brings numerous new features for the policy language, most notably http support with the url_get() function, body inheritance, and support for persistent classes through the module protocol. The locations of log files have been cleaned up and standardized under /var/cfengine/log. Furthermore, some unnecessary log files like cf3.$(hostname -s).runlog have been removed. This leads to a significant performance improvement for storage access and makes it easier to work with the remaining log files, e.g. to mount them to separate partitions. All packaged dependencies have been upgraded to their latest version to bring in the latest security, performance and reliability improvements. Please see the Community Change Log and Enterprise Change Log for a detailed list of new features and changes.
How to provide feedback
The main goal of releasing the beta is to make sure that 3.8.0 works to your expectations in your environment. So if you get the chance to test out some of the features or perhaps the compatibility with your existing policy, please let us know how it went! The best way to provide feedback is to submit issues relating to the beta in the issue tracker. Please make sure to set the “Found in version” field to “3.8.0 beta”. For general questions and discussions, you can also use the CFEngine Google Group or the #cfengine and #cfengine-dev chat rooms on libera.chat.
Get it!
You can download the CFEngine community 3.8.0 beta packages and source code. If you are an Enterprise customer, please note that 3.8 is a non-LTS release and thus not covered under the support contract. If you would like to test 3.8, the Enterprise beta packages can be downloaded here. Please note that this is a beta release, so we do not recommend installing it in a production environment. We hope you enjoy the new features, and we look forward to hearing about your experience!
Known issues
- Inability to log into Mission Portal over https
- Enterprise Windows package is broken
- Call collect is broken
- AIX does not support alphabetic versions, so 3.8.0 Enterprise beta has version “3.8.99X” (where X is beta build number) on AIX. Final AIX release will have version “3.8.0” like all other platforms.
