We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.8.1 non-LTS now is released! Please note that this is a non-LTS release, which means that it is maintained for 6 months from the minor version’s (3.8.0 in this case) release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers (but packages are available for testing). The established CFEngine release schedule gives an overview over the release timelines for all releases.
Changes and improvements
The def.json feature for overriding CFEngine default configuration was introduced in 3.7 and has since seen significant adoption. The main goal of this feature is to make upgrades easier, as it makes the difference between vanilla masterfiles and user masterfiles much easier to manage. However, several users have reported unexpected behaviour with the feature, because some of the variables in def.json were not parsed early enough to be taken into account by CFEngine. This triggered several discussions, also by the CFEngine Community Advisory Board. A new design has been introduced to parse def.json natively in C, which should resolve this issue. If you had this problem, please let us know if it is resolved in 3.8.1! All bundled dependencies have been upgraded to their latest version to bring in the latest security, performance and reliability improvements. All 3.8.1 CFEngine installations include these key dependencies, among others: OpenSSL 1.0.2e, PCRE 8.38, libxml2 2.9.3, OpenLDAP 2.4.43, libcurl 7.46.0, LMDB 0.9.17. CFEngine Enterprise Policy Servers also have upgraded dependencies and include PHP 5.6.17, Redis 3.0.6, git 2.6.5. OpenSSL recently published a security advisory, but CFEngine is not affected because neither DH nor DHE key exchange can be used by CFEngine. It is probably a good idea to check other products you use, though. Please see the Community Change Log and Enterprise Change Log for a detailed list of new features and changes. We highly appreciate community contributors for pull requests that made it in time for 3.8.1!
Upgrading?
If you’re upgrading an existing CFEngine Enterprise installation, check out the upgrade documentation for guidelines to make the process as smooth as possible.
Get it!
If you are using the Community Edition, we provide you with source code, and packages for 3.8.1! 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 3.8.1, the Enterprise packages can be downloaded here. We hope you enjoy 3.8.1, and we look forward to hearing about your experience in the CFEngine Google Group!
