[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#698294: Bug#698294: Some simple test cases to consider

[Russ Allbery]

Chris Boot <crb at tiger-computing.co.uk> writes:

> Because people seem to think this is some obscure corner case, I thought
> I'd write up a very simple test case to trigger the problem:

I think you've misunderstood the comments.

Everyone understands that if you use symlinks in your Puppet manifests,
you will have this problem.  However, there is absolutely no need to use
symlinks in your Puppet manifests, and I suspect most people don't.  You
can point directly at the correct file with the source attribute.

I realize that this doesn't help you directly, since you probably have an
existing layout scheme that uses symlinks.  And I agree that symlinks
should work.  But a lot of people aren't going to run into this problem
because they're not using symlinks and there really isn't any reason why
they should need to do so.

> This time, Puppet does not produce an error at all, but the contents of
> the file remains unchanged and un-managed. In this case, this is silent
> corruption as Puppet fails to enforce the content change on the file.

I don't agree with this definition of "corruption."  I do agree that it's
a bug.  But it doesn't corrupt anything.  It just fails to make a change
that should be made.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>