[emillon]

I have the feeling that choosing a configuration management system is very similar to choosing a build system. There are a few big players where it's easy to do easy things and possible to do complex things, but hacking with them is very arcane (like GNU make). There seem to be quite a lot of documentation and contributed packages for both Puppet and chef, for example.

But, instead of trying to fix what is broken, it seems that a lot of people end up reinventing the wheel and writing their own "lightweight" configuration management system.

As someone that wants to switch to such a system, I believe that it will be easier to learn puppet since the existing code base is just enormous.