[DRE-maint] Bug#924409: removing hiera from debian? or do not ship with buster

[Antoine Beaupré]

On 2019-03-14 08:21:10, Apollon Oikonomopoulos wrote:
> Control: severity -1 important
> Control: tags -1 - buster
> Control: retitle -1 hiera should be removed after Buster is released
>
> Hi,
>
> On 13:07 Tue 12 Mar     , Antoine Beaupre wrote:
>> I see that Hiera in Puppet is at version 3.2.0 in buster. That's at
>> least two minor versions behind upstream, which is (unofficially) at
>> 3.5:
>> 
>> https://github.com/puppetlabs/hiera/releases
>> 
>> That said, Hiera itself is deprecated as a standalone system: Hiera 5
>> has been part of Puppet since 4.9:
>> 
>> https://puppet.com/docs/hiera/3.3/index.html
>> 
>> The Hiera README on GitHub says the same:
>> 
>> https://github.com/puppetlabs/hiera/blob/master/README.md
>> 
>> "This project is deprecated in favor of Hiera version 5 which is
>> implementation in Puppet."
>> 
>> Since Buster will likely ship with Puppet 5.5 (or later), it doesn't
>> seem to make sense to ship Hiera in buster and it should be
>> removed. It could also be removed from unstable as well, but I wanted
>> to checkin with maintainers here first before filing a formal removal.
>
> Puppet currently lists `hiera` (3) as a runtime dependency in its 
> gemspec[1]. This is to provide backward compatibility until users 
> manually upgrade[2] their Puppet manifests, as Hiera 3 and Hiera 5 are 
> incompatible.
>
> Since Hiera 5 was introduced after Stretch was released, we should keep 
> plain `hiera` around for Buster to allow users to upgrade in a 
> non-disruptive fashion. Of course we should document all of this on the 
> release notes :)
>
> I'm lowering severity to non-RC, but keeping the bug around with an 
> updated title so that we can remove hiera after Buster's release.

Awesome, thanks for the update and your work!

A.

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