Hi, I am thinking ahead a bit regarding puppet 5 and how we should deal with all the requests for features that require deprecations. (There are some related things like requests for additional validation and warnings that are different from deprecations).

In the past we merrily started issuing deprecation warnings, but the community pretty unanimously said "stop doing that" we cannot deal with all of those warnings. Since then we then pretty much stopped doing deprecation warnings.

There has also been a long standing wish for a "strict mode" in puppet, that like a harsh teacher would point out every itty-bitty problem.

So - what should we do?

In PUP-5889 I have described an idea. This is the text from that ticket
as it stands right now.

PUP-5889
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Add a flag --strict to puppet settings. When in effect this will turn on --strict_variables, and will also enable other "helpful" but undesirable behavior. (Each such behavior to be defined in a separate ticket).

The semantics of this flag should be:

* '--strict=ignore'; no strictness checks are to be performed, nothing is reported.

* '--strict=warn'; strictness checks are performed, they are reported as warnings, individually configurable warnings follow their own setting (i.e. if they are added to disabled_warnings).

* '--strict=errors'; strictness checks are performed, they are reported as errors and stop the execution. Further configuration to error individually is not supported.

When we add this we promise to not change the set of things that lead to warning/error in .z releases, but we reserve the right to do so for .x releases. The idea being is that you can safely accept updates for .z without having to do anything. For .x releases you may need to step back to '--strict=warning' and then correct the problem before going back to '--strict=error'.

This scheme should cater to those that are pedantic about following best practices and not using deprecated features while those that only care at major version boundaries can do so in peace without being bothered with lots of deprecation warnings.
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What do you think about this idea? Control all strictness and deprecation warnings/errors with one flag, and handle individual ones (where applicable) by disabling those checks.

The benefit for us developing puppet is that we can introduce the new behavior much sooner and we do not need to add flags for each and every kind of validation/deprecation. This means we are more likely to improve things as we are not holding off until the very last release in a major series (and where inevitably some tickets will not make it).

Ironically, if this feature is liked it will make it into 4.5.0 which may be the last in the 4.x series, but no decision has been made yet.

- henrik

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