[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#947105: Bug#947105: puppet: Default install uses outdated configuration file and directory locations

[Todd H. Poole]

Hi Louis-Philippe, Thomas,

Appreciate your responses. Feel free to adjust the severity. The reportbug
docs[1] defined "important" as "a bug which has a major effect on the
usability of a package, without rendering it completely unusable" so that's
just what I went with.

As for usability, given that all of Debian's man pages, all of PuppetLab's
(fairly thorough) online docs, and all of the top internet search results
and StackOverflow posts relevant to Puppet 5.x assume/use the post-2015
config file and directory locations, it seemed reasonable to say this had
"a major effect on usability". Puppet is sufficiently complex that
referring to these external resources feels pretty common, so if those
external resources don't accurately capture Debian's differences, usability
suffers.

As for /etc/puppetlabs/puppet being longer to type than /etc/puppet/, I
agree with you in principle, but in practice, the vast majority of users
have shells that support path completion which reduces the difference down
to one or two extra key strokes (/e[TAB]pu[TAB] vs. /e[TAB]pu[TAB]p[TAB]).
The hundreds of milliseconds consumed by those extra keystrokes are surely
dwarfed by the tens of minutes those same users might spend searching for
and reading through docs which are all going to be consistent with
themselves and other platforms, but silently inconsistent with Debian's
packages.

As for /etc/puppet being clearer than /etc/puppetlabs/puppet - eh, they
both seem equally clear to me. I can't imagine many people wondering what
software might be inside /etc/puppetlabs.

As for abnormal vendor advertising, I'm not sure I see it like that. It
honestly just strikes me as a choice some engineer was forced to make so as
not to collide with previous installations during the 3.x to 4.x
transition. Doesn't feel like an intentional advertising effort on behalf
of PuppetLabs to me.

As for departing from prior behavior, I'll give you that: that's why there
was so much messaging around the 4.x release and such a strong up-tick in
the quality of the upstream docs around that time. If you were to change
this now, I'd absolutely advocate doing so as part of your Puppet 6.x
release.

At the end of the day, it's your guys' call, but being consistent with a
universe of supporting documentation built up (and continuing to build up)
from years of StackOverflow posts, years of blog posts, years of forum
posts, years of search engine results, and reams of man pages and upstream
docs would seem to me to be far more valuable than preserving behavior that
changed in early 2015.

[1]https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities

Something to think about,
Todd
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