Good Afternoon All,

I'm just pondering - I think that my expectations of the forge are not 100% 
aligned, or I'm still rubbish with puppet!

I imagine the forge to be used in the following scenario/way

I'm in a situation where I need to provision package X in a particular way. I 
fire up my terminal:

$ puppet module search packageX
Searching https://forge.puppetlabs.com ...
NAME                           DESCRIPTION                  AUTHOR        
KEYWORDS     
author-packageX      Function Y                        @author           
packageX

Great! Someone has already published a module for my package - So I install it

$ puppet module install author-packageX

I fire up my puppet dashboard, and I create a new class, and I add it to my 
test rig

At this point my expectation is that I should get a basic vanilla 
install/configuration of that package and dependencies. For example, if the 
package is MySql, I'm expecting to have a working default install of MySql 
after my test rig checks in. My faith starts to shake when I'm looking at 
modules like wordpress. Picture the scene.

Now, If I'm building a wordpress module, it's going to have a few dependencies, 
MySQL, and Apache etc - By chance, I already have some of my own modules that 
install MySQL and Apache, I'll just reuse those in my wordpress module. After 
two days I give up, and notice that there is a module on the forge for 
wordpress. Now I'm stuck, because I'm assuming that the author has done similar 
work to what I did - I'm going to spend quite some time making sure the forge 
modules play nice with my custom ones.

Using the forge feels like installing packages from a repository, and one thing 
that I think we all expect, is that all the packages in a repository work 
together - Which is not the case with the forge, as anyone can publish anything 
at anytime. (I may be wrong, but this is how I'm reasoning through my paranoia!)

This causes a mental stumbling block for me, because
 
$ puppet module install packageX

doesn't invoke the same sense of security as

$ apt-get/yum update packageX
 
even though they are both essentially doing the same thing - pulling in open 
source code from the outside world to configure my system.

I'm hoping that my reasoning is flawed, and that a few of you are chuckling as 
you read this calling me a NooBie Donkey! Is the forge suppose to a place for 
people to post examples, and am I then expected to edit that code accordingly 
to fit my environment? If so, then what would be the motivation to push my 
changes back?

Sorry if I sound incoherent here - I'm trying to determine how best to make use 
of the forge, otherwise I'll end up just reinventing the wheel and writing up 
manifests from scratch, which to me defeats the purpose.

Discuss :)

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