On Tuesday, July 30, 2013 12:56:56 PM UTC-5, Paul Pham wrote:
>
> Appreciate the input guys. You're right about the --nodeps flag being an 
> RPM thing, I was hoping there might be something similar I could leverage 
> from the yum provider, but it looks like the yum provider does not 
> currently support "install_options" anyway, so it's kind of moot.
>
> It seems like there's a bug/feature request in here somewhere, but I still 
> can't put my finger on it. I'm talking about Java, but in general if you 
> have some type of runtime that has multiple vendors/providers, and you're 
> using Alternatives to configure your default provider for that type of 
> runtime, how does/should puppet handle it? Or should I not be relying on 
> alternatives to set defaults? Is the main problem that the cassandra RPM 
> requires openjdk, or is that standard practice (and I should learn to deal 
> with it?)
>
> Do most folks who use puppet not use yum? Or are most people okay with 
> letting puppet install dependencies automagically?
>
>

I suspect that most people who use Puppet with yum-based clients let Puppet 
install dependencies automagically via yum, at least in most cases.  I 
certainly do.  If you need finer control then that's what the 'rpm' command 
and Puppet's direct rpm provider are for.

I exercise a measure of control by configuring yum to use local mirrors of 
most of the repositories we rely on.  In principle, that affords me the 
opportunity to audit all packages available for installation, but in 
practice I do very little of that.  It also allows me to control when 
package updates become available for installation, which I make much less 
frequent than the upstream providers do.  Additionally, it allows me to 
pick and choose what versions of what packages from upstream are available 
at all, but I exercise that capability only very rarely.

The careful among us may go so far as to maintain test environments that 
encompass repository updates in addition to Puppet manifest and data 
updates.

I think you should give a bit of thought to *why* you are uncomfortable 
with using yum via Puppet (and that's really what you're saying, since yum 
doesn't offer any form of nodeps operation, Puppet notwithstanding).  There 
may be a way to mitigate your concerns without greatly complicating your 
Puppet manifests by explicitly declaring all dependencies, recursively, of 
every package you want Puppet to manage.


John

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