And now I'll say if you like Perl then there's a simple CFEngine-lite-like project I started called Slaughter:

http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/guide/

Policies (read "perl scripts" + "file templates") are fetched from a central location, which could be a git repository, a SSH server, an rsync export, or similar. Then they're compiled and executed locally.

Surprisingly powerful, plus you get the power of Perl + CPAN.