Issue #13210 has been updated by Chris Price.
I discussed this with Matt Robinson, who had been involved to some degree with the original ticket. His recollection was that there were arguments for both of the two approaches--so it does not sound like there was an overwhelming argument in support of the current behavior. It seems to me that an important consideration here is: "what is the target audience of the function definition API?" If we're targeting developers, then I don't think it's unreasonable to expect authors to know that they may need to account for nil or :undef values being passed in as arguments. If we're targeting a broader audience and making the function definition as simple as possible is the primary goal, then I can perhaps see the case for passing undefs as empty strings. My overall take on this, though, is that there are cases in the world where there is a meaningful semantic distinction between "null" and an empty string (plenty of precedent for this in relational databases, etc.), and that our current implementation explicitly prevents users from handling that distinction. Thus I'd be inclined to mark this ticket as accepted and propose that we change the behavior... probably to passing 'nil'. Will leave this ticket open for comments for a while and see if there are strong feelings one way or the other. ---------------------------------------- Bug #13210: undef changes into '' when passed to function as a param https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/13210#change-58703 Author: Timur Batyrshin Status: Investigating Priority: Normal Assignee: Chris Price Category: Target version: Affected Puppet version: Keywords: Branch: Suppose we have a manifest like that: <pre> define foo ( $x = '1' ) { notify { "x${x}": } } class bar { $x = myfunc( undef ) foo {'no1': x=> $x } } class baz { $x = undef foo {'no2': x=> $x } } include bar include baz </pre> With myfunc() defined like that: <pre> module Puppet::Parser::Functions newfunction(:myfunc, :type => :rvalue) do |param| return param end end </pre> When applying the manifest we get the following output. <pre> notice: x notice: /Stage[main]/Bar/Foo[no1]/Notify[x]/message: defined 'message' as 'x' notice: x1 notice: /Stage[main]/Baz/Foo[no2]/Notify[x1]/message: defined 'message' as 'x1' notice: Finished catalog run in 0.06 seconds </pre> However the same message should be produced in both calls to foo. -- You have received this notification because you have either subscribed to it, or are involved in it. To change your notification preferences, please click here: http://projects.puppetlabs.com/my/account -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Bugs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-bugs?hl=en.
