Structured fact support in Facter has often been compared to unicorns -
long sought after, greatly desired, and nonexistent. There have been a
number of proposed implementations but none have managed to make it into
Facter - either the implementation was incomplete, changed too many things,
or just didn’t have follow-through. Structured fact support has also been a
hard requirement for Facter 2, which has meant that Facter 2 itself has
been in limbo for a long time.
We’re hoping to change this state of affairs, and get a release of Facter 2
out that contains structured facts. In order to get something out in short
order, the initial implementation will support simple data types like
arrays, hashes, strings, and numbers, and will support basic fact
composition. The idea is to get the core behavior released into the wild in
Facter 2, and add more functionality in the Facter 2.x series*.
Normally the next major release of Facter would be based on master, but
doing so would make things more complicated. The master and stable branches
have been diverging for over a year, and master is 400 commits ahead of
stable. The stable branch has only been receiving bugfixes while the master
branch has been receiving features, but since master has been intended to
be Facter 2 it’s been receiving breaking features as well as non-breaking
features. We know the master branch will definitely break things, but we no
longer know exactly what it’s going to break.
Because the state of master is so uncertain we’ve decided to base Facter 2
off of stable. Structured facts will be implemented, but Facter 2 won’t see
a rewrite of all the core facts to minimize the changes released in Facter
2. The goal is to base Facter 2 off a known release state and minimize the
amount of possible breaking changes so that the upgrade from Facter 1 to
Facter 2 is as painless as possible. Later in the 2.x series we intend to
start writing new core facts that take advantage to structured data once
the initial release has landed and works.
Basing Facter 2 off of stable means that we will need to do some reordering
of the Facter branches. Our CI jobs currently test against the master and
stable branches, so in order to test Facter 2 against the rest of our
projects the master branch will need to be changed to the stable branch,
and the current state of master will be shifted to a new name. I propose
that we copy the master branch to a ‘next’ branch, and then revert the
master branch to stable and start work on Facter 2 from there. This means
that pull requests will be targeted at the right branch by default, our CI
jobs will continue to behave as normal, and we can synchronize our branch
strategy with Puppet and Hiera.
Since there are a number of commits in Facter master that we’ve promised
will be in Facter 2, we’ll be backporting a number of changes from the next
branch to master. We want to keep the number of backported changes limited
to minimize the number of changes in Facter 2, but we realize that there
are changes that many of you have been waiting on for a while. If there are
specific commits that you really want to see in Facter 2, let us know and
we can see about getting them backported. And of course, once Facter 2 is
released we’ll be able to start putting out feature releases much more
quickly. If things don’t make it into Facter 2 then we can see about
getting features released in 2.1.
* Tentative roadmap for upcoming Facter releases:
-
1.7.4
-
release date: mid-December
-
base: current stable
-
features: current stable + bugfixes for external facts (#22944,
#22622)
-
2.0.0
-
release date: mid-January
-
base: current stable
-
features: structured facts + short list of candidates from (current)
master
-
2.1.0
-
release date: TBD
-
base: future master
-
features: more facts from (current) master, select facts rewritten as
structured facts
--
Adrien Thebo | Puppet Labs
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