Announcing CFEngine 3.27.0

[Nick Anderson]

Hello fellow CFEngineers,

We are happy to announce the availability of CFEngine 3.27.0.

Patch a new LTS series, it's packed with great stuff.

To highlight just a few things:

• new functions like classfilterdata()
• new tools like cfbs convert and cfbs analyze
• new capabiities like native profiling data from cf-agent and choosing to evaluate policy in the order it's written.

For more details, please read our blog post.

Community packages for 3.27.0 are available from the community download page and public repositories. Enterprise packages are available from the Enterprise package download page.

Community artifacts and digests for 3.27.0

Table 1: 3.27.0 Binary Packages

Description	Architecture	URL	SHA256
Debian 12	x86_64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_debian12_x86_64/cfengine-community_3.27.0-1.debian12_amd64.deb	67d5d6e3b9709ca4b847af25aba8612cf8353d73e64178ab9aa9600cf2f36d03
Debian 12	aarch64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_debian12_arm_64/cfengine-community_3.27.0-1.debian12_arm64.deb	3d601a468bda7befb53c94334ea02179ed8a75aa6fac80130c3a0541d0938111
Debian 13	x86_64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_debian13_x86_64/cfengine-community_3.27.0-1.debian13_amd64.deb	922c6731c46b0ea5f04fb950595d01ae7c931254419e9958f99e839188600309
Debian 13	aarch64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_debian13_arm_64/cfengine-community_3.27.0-1.debian13_arm64.deb	576755cb396d37cd07401bc867844b1c11844db0e8c6096bcba9b457e24ae798
Ubuntu 22.04	x86_64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_ubuntu22_x86_64/cfengine-community_3.27.0-1.ubuntu22_amd64.deb	d2ce1687dbbdc0d196d390829539a4cb11150487a304db1d596aea6978341a6c
Ubuntu 22.04	aarch64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_ubuntu22_arm_64/cfengine-community_3.27.0-1.ubuntu22_arm64.deb	a5f43c17eb8d6bb950d5e4afaa7fb5e1bd7f78b396c0d52acd73402e6c254235
Ubuntu 24.04	aarch64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_ubuntu24_arm_64/cfengine-community_3.27.0-1.ubuntu24_arm64.deb	5de6d6e0bdf14c4a6a09cda9d30a5af11bbff7fbc20ccf7dfca3812796c7d563
Ubuntu 24.04	x86_64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_ubuntu24_x86_64/cfengine-community_3.27.0-1.ubuntu24_amd64.deb	0495637d032182dc3a51ca71dac8d6e88306a98977c5c3ce22a56efbd67f50f8
Red Hat / CentOS 8	x86_64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_rhel8_x86_64/cfengine-community-3.27.0-1.el8.x86_64.rpm	c4ed5c03f5dea75ac90691b564e7b7b940e8094ae715a49f1fa83d51e2dfa0cf
Red Hat / CentOS 9	x86_64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_rhel9_x86_64/cfengine-community-3.27.0-1.el9.x86_64.rpm	5fc12c36dd89802b11893c0b8b298bceae8a03d1fc64b863d6170f86437e5646
Red Hat / CentOS 10	x86_64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_rhel10_x86_64/cfengine-community-3.27.0-1.el10.x86_64.rpm	b9f1c01f74bb0f4da0df2c7e450016edabad3543685dd095a1cd6bec1775231b
Red Hat / CentOS 10	aarch64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/agent_rhel10_arm_64/cfengine-community-3.27.0-1.el10.aarch64.rpm	d7af23965ae2b784bcb27c112d0cad687e759abaf290e3daf1b30c981977ff22

Table 2: 3.27.0 Additional Assets

Description	Architecture	URL	SHA256
Masterfiles ready-to-install tarball	no arch	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/misc/cfengine-masterfiles-3.27.0-1.pkg.tar.gz	9c2fafebf8f0cb8ed70b4b3f3c445d0501de88abd7b7f0260083b4dd27724788
Linux binary tarball (unsupported)	x86_64	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/community_binaries/Community-3.27.0/misc/cfengine-community-3.27.0-1.x86_64.pkg.tar.gz	d453e80b664efecb2c0261f3e2af058fb465de063889b3778353260cc9f3d202
Masterfiles source tarball	no arch	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/tarballs/cfengine-masterfiles-3.27.0.tar.gz	84803035168af3e43c1fb25ba5f90561dec33b151ef5d5359a108a06c4c7c61d
Source code tarball	no arch	https://cfengine-package-repos.s3.amazonaws.com/tarballs/cfengine-community-3.27.0.tar.gz	d793e830b02e09843bf8ece1efd538cd65fa0428f249bbf7e371ca52d5f97b43

[Markus Rexhepi-Lindberg]

From what I understand is that you do not support platform versions that are not supported anymore by their vendors. So Debian 11 for instance is stated as being dropped from support in the blog post. Does this imply enterprise support or the community packages and masterfiles as well? What I'm really wondering is, will I not be able to use CFEngine 3.27 on a Debian 11 agent? From the looks of it debian_11 is present in the `standalone_self_upgrade.cf` policy for instance.

BR/

Markus

[Nick Anderson]

Hi Markus,

From what I understand is that you do not support platform versions that are not supported anymore by their vendors. So Debian 11 for instance is stated as being dropped from support in the blog post. Does this imply enterprise support or the community packages and masterfiles as well?

That's correct. We drop platforms after they have been dropped by their vendors and based on demand from our customers. This applies to Enterprise, Community and masterfiles.

What I'm really wondering is, will I not be able to use CFEngine 3.27 on a Debian 11 agent? From the looks of it debian_11 is present in the `standalone_self_upgrade.cf` policy for instance.

When support for a platform is dropped we don't proactively try to prevent those platforms from working but we do not try to maintain them. References to old platforms may live on for years or may be tidied up from time to time. But importantly, we don't build packages, we don't test them in CI.

If you would like for us to continue to maintain some old platform the best way is to reach out about extended support

Will you be able to use CFEngine 3.27 on Debian 11? We currently have no plans to build 3.27 or newer packages, but if you build them it's likely to work as you would expect.

We will continue to produce binaries for Debian 11 for 3.24.x until it is end of life.

Do you have any other questions about supported platforms?

[Markus Rexhepi-Lindberg]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the great response!

> We will continue to produce binaries for Debian 11 for 3.24.x until it is end of life.

Then it would probably make sense to use 3.24 for Debian 11 and 3.27 for Debian >= 12 and any other distribution version supported by 3.27. I gather that macros will make it possible to use older (> 3.7) versions on agents while the hub stays on 3.27 (I've seen some corner cases for this, but that is manageable for our MPF).

[Marco Marongiu]

Hi Markus

There are two potential drawbacks in the dual-version approach that you should be aware of (maybe you are already):

• security patches: 3.24 will stop receiving security updates eventually, which may expose your clients to risk
• masterfiles: you may need to tweak masterfiles to ensure that they are compatible with both versions; maybe it's not a problem, maybe it will...

Ciao,
-- bronto