[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#950182: a proposal to salvage Puppet Debian packages

[Antoine Beaupré]

On 2022-03-30 11:28:09, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> Hi,

Following up on my own thread, two weeks later.

> TL:DR; (1) I want to join the team (2) let's package puppet agent 6
> clean, then puppetserver 6 and/or 7 for bookworm.

It seems I was granted access to the Puppet team on salsa, thanks! :)

And since then, I noticed some critical information that I hadn't
noticed before: Ruby 2.7 was removed from bookworm.

https://tracker.debian.org/news/1311269/ruby27-removed-from-testing/

This means that any Puppet version before Puppet 7.8 will likely not run
in Debian bookworm at all, since that's the first version which added
support for Ruby 3+:

https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/7/release_notes_puppet.html#release_notes_puppet_7-8-0

I still think my proposal makes sense. We should focus on upgrading the
client to Puppet agent 6, which should hopefully survive that transition
regardless. Then we could focus on packaging Puppet Server *seven*,
since it *will* be compatible with the Puppet agent 6. We would, in
effect, be skipping Puppet Server 6.

This has a few implications for our users. They will either need to:

 * upgrade everything at once, that is: upgrade the server from Puppet
   master 5 to Puppet server 7, and *simultaneously* upgrade from Puppet
   agent 5 to Puppet agent 6 (an alternative would be to setup a
   different Puppet server 7 and migrate machines over to that server
   progressively, but this could be messy with exported resources)

 * use the upstream packages for Puppet server 6 while the fleet is
   upgraded to Puppet agent 6, then switch back to the Debian package
   for Puppet server 7

I don't really see another way around this, because Puppet server 6
can't possibly work in Debian bookworm and above anymore, because of the
Ruby 2.7 removal.

The Puppet Server 7 work could happen in th Clojure team sprint in May,
which would land us a Puppet server ready for the bookworm freeze.

We *could* also work on Puppet server 6 and "fast track" it to bullseye:

https://fasttrack.debian.net/

But that feels like duplication of work a little. If I would have to
choose between Puppet server 6 and 7, I would choose the latter. And
given how much availability we all seem to have to work on this problem,
it *does* seem like we need to choose.

If there are no objections, I'll start working on the agent 6 in the
next few weeks/months.

Thanks for any feedback,

A.
-- 
In serious work commanding and discipline are of little avail.
                         - Peter Kropotkin