Right, it looked a little bit messy. I have copied the code from vim and modified the code in the git editor short before the pull. I'm not really sure  why it failed on line 25 I have double checked it and it's working on my Debian test vm.  I have thought about it but finally I have decided to add it to install.pp. When you install sysstat most probably you also want to use the service, so as a part of the install the default should be modified. Even before the service is started.