[Pkg-puppet-devel] puppet version management

[Stig Sandbeck Mathisen]

Anthony BERGER <anthony.berger at cea.fr> writes:

> yes, i already use mini-dinstall... it work well for a little repo
> (but, sometime very slow..! )

Try looking at "reprepro".  It's a bit more complex, but is much faster.
Just try not to put the configuration and db files in your web root, as
some of the HOWTO documents specify.

> The problem with puppet is the unsupported all clients versions on an
> up to date puppetmaster... !
> Just Why ?

Puppet is a new tool, and still in development, as indicated by the
0.something version numbering of all the previous releases.

Quite a lot has happened between the version available for etch, lenny
and squeeze.

> The master should know all old clients and manage the clients
> connexions accordingly.

Since puppet is open source software, and the upstream developer is
quite small, they would certainly welcome patches to fix this, should
you develop them.

It would also require thousands of hours of developing and performing
tests for master-client compatibility.  If you've got time, it's a place
to get started.  (Or rather, don't do this, I'm just being sarcastic :)

> The case you told me should be an internal mechanism ?
>
> no ?

It _could_ be.  However, it would depend on the resources used in your
manifests.

I think that spending time fixing that for the now old and certainly
out-of-date 0.24 series of puppet would be a waste of developer
resources, and most likely also for the 0.25.x series.

It makes little sense to ensure full agent-master compatibility for all
versions at that stage in the development of such a tool.  It's
certainly on the "nice-to-have" list, but is far to expensive for the
"need-to-have" list

For the 2.6 series and forward, I expect there would be fewer changes to
the protocol, and therefore less agent-master compatibility problems.

However, this is far and wide outside the scope of packaging puppet,
which is what we do at pkg-puppet-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org.

What we _can_ do, however, is to get 2.6 into unstable, where it would
move to testing quite fast, and upload it to stable-backports as well,
so that a modern version of puppet would be available for most Debian
users.

-- 
Stig Sandbeck Mathisen
(fnord)