Hi all. tl;dr: We are proposing moving the open source package repositories back to a single repository for Puppet-owned projects and their dependencies. This represents a shift from our stated plan to release major-version releases that might contain backwards incompatibilities into their own Puppet Collection repositories, but as a result it will be less confusing to use the packages and easier to stay current.
Long version: When we released Puppet 3.0 in 2013, backward incompatibilities between it and Puppet 2.7 broke a number of sites who had configured their provisioning or package updates to install the latest version of Puppet from our repositories. In order to prevent similar breakage when we released Puppet 4 in April 2015, we introduced it into a new repository called Puppet Collection 1 (PC1), so users had to opt in rather than opt out. The idea was that future backward-incompatible updates would trigger new Puppet Collections, which would also be opt-in, so that a user could stay on PC1 and only move to PC2 when they were ready (background reading: https://puppet.com/blog/welcome-to-puppet-collections ). In practice, the switching costs to get everyone onto a new repository seemed really high and for the most part the impact of releasing into the existing collection was low, so instead we either shipped releases like PuppetDB 4.0 into PC1 or deferred shipping versions with big changes, such when we rolled back from Ruby 2.3 to 2.1 for puppet-agent-1.7.0. We've been exploring our options to balance between the following criteria: - avoid breaking sites, to not repeat the Puppet 2 to 3 pain - provide a set of component packages that are known to work with each other, and provide a basis for Puppet Enterprise platform releases - encourage rapid adoption of new releases by the open source community - provide commercial differentiation on support lifecycle, similar to the RHEL / Fedora model We talked through a number of options in pretty exhaustive detail and have tentatively settled on this as the best – or maybe "least bad" – course of action: - make a release package with a new name (probably "puppet-release"), eliminating the public face of "Collections" - move the existing repository directory structure over to a top-level "puppet" repo, leaving links in place for current PC1 users to avoid breaking them. - publish and promote the plan (probably including re-visiting that blog post above and making a new one to advertise what's happening), including instructions on how to avoid incompatible updates if you don't want them, and updating https://docs.puppet.com/puppet/latest/reference/puppet_collections.html#puppet-collection-contents - continue publishing any and all open-source releases to the "puppet" repo, including major-version releases. The patching/update policy will remain as it is today, where only the latest series receives patches. For instance, once Puppet 4.9.0 is out, there will be no more 4.8.x releases. The package repositories which contain Long Term Support Puppet Enterprise point releases will continue to be private, but the branches/tags of the components that comprise these point releases will remain public, so people could rebuild them if they wanted to. Speaking of community upstream, we want to enable builds of Puppet that behave reliably, stay current with our bugfixes and release cadence, and run on OSes that Puppet Inc. doesn't commercially support. We've been working to enable outside folks to rebuild and distribute our software and are going to continue to focus energy on this. As a few examples, we are: - working to get Puppet 4.x and Facter 3 built as standalone packages for Solaris - investigating the OS-native build toolchain for OSes with current compilers like Ubuntu Yakkety and Fedora 25 (to avoid having to rebuild the world to get the C++ packages built) - making facter-3 installable via gem for testing and distro packaging (FACT-1523) - working on including the Docker-ized Puppet Server stack into CI so new versions are automatically built and uploaded to docker hub along with traditional packages. I'd love to hear your feedback (just reply on this thread) on the proposal overall and additional steps that would make your lives easier (with respect to packaging and repos, that is). Although the next major versions won't be out for a few more months, we're looking to make the infrastructure and policy changes before the end of the year, so please chime in. --eric0 -- 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 puppet-dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/puppet-dev/A53809BB-4B46-4EC1-86BD-3BAD1EC71C2E%40puppet.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
