[Pkg-puppet-devel] a proposal to salvage Puppet Debian packages

[Antoine Beaupré]

Hi,

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.

I have been unfortunately away from Puppet packaging for too long to be
able to really lead this effort, but it seems to me we need some better
coordination on the packaging work of Puppet-related packages in Debian.

If you would allow me, I would like to get involved in the team. I think
I might be able to free up some work-paid time to work on the
packages. The reasoning is that we have a cluster of about 100 machines
that are all managed in Puppet, and it is therefore a critical package
in our infrastructure.

We are at a decision point between staying with the Debian packages or
switching to the upstream, and I would much rather get involved in the
packaging than use the upstream packages, because of the way those are
built (vendoring a lot of stuff, not respecting Debian best practices,
etc).

I think I would first like to focus on upgrading the Puppet agent
packages. This would involve uploading a clean new Puppet 6 package to
experimental, version 6.26. It wouldn't necessarily ship with a
puppetmaster, as that was (planned to be?) removed from Puppet 6. (I'm
actually surprised to see the Puppet 6 package in experimental provides
the puppet-master package, because of this.)

Then I would like to join the Clojure sprint in May to help with the
puppetserver packaging. Hopefully we resolve the blockers that keep the
Puppet Server ITP (#830904) from going through. This could result in
bookworm shipping a Puppet Server 6 package that would stay up to
date. (This would also mean it would be basically EOL by the time of
release, so maybe that's not ideal, but one step at a time.)

Then people could upgrade their fleets progressively: upgrade the server
to bookworm and then the rest of the fleet.

Once that's done, we could work on Puppet 7 for bookworm + 1 (trixie).

An alternative scenario is we fail at Puppet Server 6 for bookworm, and
focus on Puppet server 7 for trixie, assuming people would use the
upstream packages for the Puppet server 6 transition. I know it's not a
great solution, but it's the fallback we're considering at work right
now.

How does that sound?

Can I join the team? I officially requested access on Salsa, but I'm not
sure what the rest of the process is.

Please keep me in CC as I'm not (yet) on the list.

A.
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