Hi all,
I'm wondering what the state of the development and especially bug
fixing of Facter is:
Currently I have on my (very own) list 3 really nasty bugs, that make
it really hard to rely on values of core facts (e.g.: virtual,
is_virtual, ipaddress etc.) within manifest/module development, as
currently they are broken and we had to rollout hot-fixes or give
special guidelines to puppet users.
All of these bugs have been reported months ago, patches have been
proposed, but as how I - personally - see things nothing have been
done to review the pull requests nor to fix the bugs. Although, these
values are - in my opinion - very crucial for the usefulness of facter
and hence puppet.
I'm speaking of these 3 Bugs:
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/8210 - kvm guests are detected
as physical -> Without using our own patched version of facter, we can
currently not detect reliably on what kind of system we are running.
-> Install smartd on virt-guests?!
http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/10625 -> xen is not reported
properly -> Same issue as above
http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/10278 -> facter reports
different facts depending on the locale of the current environment ->
manifests might use values of certain facts to determine how a host
needs to be configured (quite a common pattern) -> due to this bug it
might happen, that if a puppet engineer with a locale different than C
(or en_US) runs puppet via cli, things might drastically change and so
also how a node is configured -> break the host by just re-applying
unchanged manifests on an unchanged node!
The goal of facter is to provide values for manifest/module
developers. Based on these values developers can then programatically
decide how things should be configured. But how should one rely on
these values if they are not reliable and nobody (excuse me) cares to
fix them?
Or is it really the idea that in the future everybody runs their very
own patched version of facter and each time there is a new (minor)
release everybody has to check whether this does not break their whole
infrastructure?
And to close my rant: Why should one be interested in new shiny
inventory tools if the tools that provide the values for them are
broken and not fixed, hence provide inaccurate information? Or in
other words: Do you really want to build new things, although you're
not interested in fixing the groundwork?
Thanks for listening!
~pete
PS: Although things might sound harsh, I'm not pissed off. I really
value the work you do. I'm more trying to bring the questions I have
to your attention. Which is from a user's point of view, but this is
how I currently see things.
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