I'll also give a quick update of what I've been up to, which should explain why I haven't been around for the past week :)
On Monday I went to my previous employer and sat with the Ops team/visited friends. Answered a couple questions about puppet, and got a lot of interest when I mentioned that we were going to be working on iteration in the language. Almost all bugs that they asked me about came down to the unpredictability of environments. I think one of the problems they encountered is fixed in 3.0 (they are on 2.7.12), but others weren't. They also showed me a cluster provisioning system that they are putting together that includes dependencies between hosts. Some very exciting stuff. On Tuesday I went to the PL London office and spent the day discussing ideas that RI has for what puppet needs to do in the future. He has some very interesting ideas around getting puppet to do more monitoring tasks or at the very least to have some of that data for *how* to monitor. He also tied that into cross node dependencies. An interesting aside: on Monday I had asked about xnode issues and they mentioned that they didn't want puppet to try to do it, they wanted puppet to become simpler and smaller. RI felt that in order to do anything useful, puppet needs to be able to allow the catalog to be more dynamic and query the infrastructure and make decisions at application time. I think this dichotomy is something that we are going to need to figure out. At the moment I don't see how to do both. Personally I'd love to see puppet get smaller and let other tools take on some of the things that puppet is trying to do right now. On Wednesday I traveled from London to Ghent, met Brice. :) On Thursday it was Puppet Camp Ghent. I ran an open space session where I asked people to come up with crazy ideas for how to change puppet. I was actually a little surprised that the ideas were really not all that crazy. I got the sense that they really just wanted puppet to have more polish. In other conversations, there was a common theme of making puppet and PE more of a toolchain. This came from consultants who do puppet training and installations who have their own manifests and want to put together bespoke installations for clients. On Friday it was the second day of Puppet Camp Ghent. I was starting to get a little tired and so things get a little blurry. I attended a talk about what not to do with puppet, which really came down to various gotchas in the language or in people's thinking about how to structure puppet manifests. I found it really interesting, but as I said I was starting to not really think straight. On Saturday was the first day of FOSDEM. JeffW and I gave our talk on Metaphor and BDD. It seemed to be very well received and had some good discussion come out of it. I spent part of the day sitting down with Erik Dalen and hacking on some code. We decided to try our hand at giving the custom function system of puppet a face lift. I've continued hacking on it some. A surprising thing was that when I said that I couldn't make a certain change because it would break people's tests 2 different people thought that I was being too careful! This brings up the question of how careful and how non-breaking we should be. Sunday was the second day of FOSDEM. Spent the morning talking with eric0 about what we had been hearing from people (he has more notes on this, I think). Spent the afternoon watching a couple sessions in the Cloud devroom. There was a talk about a system called Heat that is in incubation for OpenStack. At first I thought it would be very relevant to our interest in orchestration, but I didn't see that it was immediately applicable, but it was still very nice. Another thing was about a project called Aeolus, which handles image management across various cloud providers. It also brought up a project called Oz, which sounded like it would be interesting for us for testing puppet since it might be a nice common way to create base machines for running system integration tests in various environments (locally or on EC2 for our CI systems). Today and tomorrow I'm at the #monitoringlove thing trying to recover and catch back up. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-dev?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
