On May 28, 2010, at 4:46 AM, Daniel Pittman wrote:
Luke Kanies <l...@puppetlabs.com> writes:
External data (that is, data specified outside of Puppet manifests)
seems to
keep coming up.
If you forgive me banging my own drum, it isn't just /external/
data; access
to data that puppet knows, like facts of other nodes, is equally
valuable in
some use cases.
eg: "give me an array of fqdn facts for hosts including
example::service"
I hit that when I run into trying to build multi-system services, for
availability or scalability, but questions of this sort are
relatively common
in the user list too.
This is a pretty different use case, but it's one I'm interested in
solving, also. However, I want to make sure it's not just a case of
'make a database call and stick the results in an array'. You say
you're banging your own drum here - do you solve this now?
[...]
FWIW, though, I agree with your general breakdown of the
requirements. From
an end-user perspective I would agree those would meet most of my
use cases,
other than as outlined above.
So, the questions become, what should we do here, and are any of the
solutions we have right now good enough to ship today?
extlookup currently uses CSV for external data, and I don't think
most users
will want to use that. At the least, any long-term answer needs
to support
something more user-friendly like YAML.
YAML, or some XML format, would be nice from my perspective; either
of them
much better represents the complexities encountered in real-world
data.
A couple of examples to support that are:
In managing Apache modules across platforms, we need to perform two
major
tasks: install the module, and enable the module.
The first one is the most complex: it means at least one, maybe more
packages
for the module; the second is one, maybe two, configuration bits and
pieces.
Using CSV would ... work, but it would be flattening this data
structure:
fastcgi:
- libapache2-mod-fastcgi
- libfcgi-perl # ok, so not strictly required. ;)
proxy_http:
Structured data is definitely important.
--
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls
and looks like work. -- Thomas A. Edison
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Luke Kanies -|- http://puppetlabs.com -|- +1(615)594-8199
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