Hie Peter, On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 5:32 AM, Peter Meier <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm wondering what the state of the development and especially bug fixing of > Facter is:
For the state of puppet development we've been trying to keep the tickets in redmine as up to date as possible. We are using the target version field as a way of communicating what we are hoping to get in a release, but it isn't a guarantee that it will actually make it in. We have been getting a bit of work on Puppet done, but Facter has been falling by the wayside. > > 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. > This is an area that we've been really week in: keeping on top of patches from people outside of Puppet Labs. We've been trying to have a (rotating) person dedicated to responding to those, but I'll admit that I've often had to pull them off in order to work on other things. Without that person looking at pull requests they end up falling by the wayside. This is really not a good situation, because a huge about of what makes puppet work in all of these environments is the contributions from others. So yeah...this is a big problem right now. I'm open to suggestions about how we could work differently to fix it. Maybe giving out commit access to more people outside of Puppet Labs? > 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? > Yep > 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? > Oh god no. I don't want to be in that situation. I think that is almost the situation we are in right now, though. > 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? > I agree completely. I've been on trying to shift focus to shoring up the groundwork, but the lure of shiny new things is hard to resist. > 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. > Hey, I think you have some good reasons to be pissed off. > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Puppet Developers" 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-dev?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Developers" 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-dev?hl=en.
