how best to maintain things like apache?

[Pur A. Lux]

How do people use cfengine to maintain things like
apache?  or maybe tomcat?  When I install a new version
of apache on a server, I have to compile it against
a few other things (openssl, modssl, so on).  So we
have a script that dists out all the tar files we need
to build the new version of apache, and then compiles
it all.  I could rig cfengine up to start all that off,
sure, but there must be a better way to do it.

Or how about something like tomcat - we just use a
binary build of that.  basically untar it in the right
place, and change a symbolic link, and it can be used.
How best to manage that using cfengine?  Do people
normally untar the new version of tomcat on their
cfengine master server, and then make cfengine do a
copy tree to copy it out?  It seems expensive - that
file copy needs to be checked every time cfagent runs.
But maybe that's not a big deal.

How do people maintain things like these using
cfengine?  What's the 'cfengine way' for things like
these?

Pura