[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#892908: puppet 5 is now builtin to puppet since 4.9

[Gabriel Filion]

Package: puppet
Version: 5.4.0-1
Severity: minor

Hello,

Hiera version 5 is now built into puppet. It's been so since 4.9

ref: https://docs.puppet.com/hiera/#note-weve-released-a-major-update-to-hiera-called-hiera-5

It's now possible to perform a hiera lookup with:

puppet lookup key_name [options...]

this works well with the current packaged puppet binary. I'm just
curious whether the package's dependency on the hiera package is still
needed. hiera 3.x (as distributed by the hiera package) is still
maintained but I'm wondering if we require it with newer puppet
installs.

I haven't made any sort of test yet. I guess to test this, we'd need a
puppet package without the dependency on hiera installed on a host
without hiera, then check that lookups are still working regardless of
the tool's absence.

If tests are successful then I believe we could simply drop the
dependency to hiera from the puppet package.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.15.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_CA.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_CA.utf8), LANGUAGE=en_CA.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_CA.utf8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages puppet depends on:
ii  adduser              3.117
ii  facter               3.10.0-3
ii  hiera                3.2.0-2
ii  init-system-helpers  1.51
ii  lsb-base             9.20170808
ii  ruby                 1:2.5.0
ii  ruby-augeas          1:0.5.0-3+b5
ii  ruby-deep-merge      1.1.1-1
ii  ruby-shadow          2.5.0-1

Versions of packages puppet recommends:
ii  debconf-utils  1.5.66
ii  lsb-release    9.20170808
ii  ruby-selinux   2.7-2+b1

Versions of packages puppet suggests:
pn  ruby-hocon  <none>
pn  ruby-rrd    <none>

-- no debconf information