[Pkg-puppet-devel] Proposed Puppet installation changes

[Todd Zullinger]

Greetings puppet packagers,

I'm Todd.  I help maintain the puppet packages for Fedora and EPEL.  I
found your names and addresses associated with puppet packages for
various Linux distributions and other operating systems.  If I've
included anyone mistakenly, please accept my apologies.  Likewise, if
there is a better address to reach the packagers of puppet for your
distribution/OS, I'd be happy to learn about it.

With that out of the way, the reason for this message is to seek your
opinions and help in making puppet's installation process a slight bit
easier for packagers and administrators.

The initial question I have is about the location of the system
binaries and scripts.  Currently, the install.rb script in the puppet
source release installs these in ruby's Config::CONFIG["bindir"]
(typically /usr/bin on linux).  On many distributions, we prefer to
place the daemons and other administrator binaries and scripts into
Config::CONFIG["sbindir"] (typically /usr/sbin).

I submitted a patch¹ to install several of the binaries/scripts in
sbindir by default (puppetca, puppetd, and puppetmasterd, and
puppetrun).  This matches what Debian does currently, I believe.
Fedora is similar, though we are currently not installing puppetca in
sbindir -- I think Debian is more consistent in that regard. ;)

I think if we improve the puppet install script such that it is usable
by more packagers, it might make all of our jobs just a bit easier.
And if we choose sane defaults, we might even end up with less
confusion for users who run multiple different operating systems.

What are your thoughts on this?  Feel free to reply to this message,
or join the thread on the puppet-dev list.  (The message-id, to keep
things threaded, is: 20090311073826.GP10507 at inocybe.teonanacatl.org)

Thanks for reading.  And thanks for packaging puppet!

¹ This is an incomplete patch, mainly to get comments from the
community of users, developers, and packagers:
http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-dev/browse_thread/thread/e63d8964dd508bbd

-- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Would you let the aliens land, please?  They might be here to pick me
up.
    -- Bill Hicks

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 542 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-puppet-devel/attachments/20090317/98423bc1/attachment.pgp