[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#1056355: puppet-agent should depend more strongly on core modules

[Antoine Beaupre]

Package: puppet-agent
Version: 7.23.0-1
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: bugs at bastelfreak.de

bastelfreak (in cc) explicitly requested that our Debian packages
follow the upstream convention of shipping the vendored "core" modules
with puppet-agent. Those are augeas, cron, host, mailalias, mount,
selinux, (etc?). They have been taken out of Puppet, but are actually
*vendored* in the upstream source and shipped with Puppet AIO
packages.

Right now, our puppet-agent debian package merely "Suggests"
those. (The puppetserver package, surprisingly, "Recommends" them,
even though it Depends: puppet-agent. My feeling is that it should
delegate that decision to puppet-agent, but that's another issue
altogether.)

This was discussed before: in #1050337, the puppetserver was noted as
missing a Recommends: *mailalias-core. And in #1054664, someone
installed the puppet-module-puppetlabs-cron-core package and *still*
couldn't use the Cron resource (which I personnally find surprising,
but probably worth investigating on its own).

Overall, I agree with bastelfreak here: upstream split out those
resources in their own git repos to make development easier, but
didn't actually *mean* to remove them completely from Puppet. They are
still shipped upstream, and we should still ship them as well.

That we package them as separate packages is probably fine (as long as
it works!). But I say we should Depend on them.

An alternative would be to Recommends: the packages, but I think
that's not strong enough.

The downside of Depends is it makes it Really Hard to *not* install
those *-core modules, but I don't see how that use case would be
important in the first place.

Opinions?


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.2
  APT prefers stable-security
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental'), (1, 'unstable'), (1, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 6.5.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN
Locale: LANG=fr_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages puppet-agent depends on:
ii  adduser                3.134
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.82
ii  facter                 4.3.0-2
ii  hiera                  3.10.0-1
ii  init-system-helpers    1.65.2
ii  ruby                   1:3.1
ii  ruby-augeas            1:0.5.0+gem-1
ii  ruby-concurrent        1.1.6+dfsg-5
ii  ruby-deep-merge        1.1.1-2
ii  ruby-semantic-puppet   1.0.4-1
ii  ruby-shadow            2.5.1-1
ii  ruby-sorted-set        1.0.3-3

Versions of packages puppet-agent recommends:
ii  augeas-tools   1.14.0-1
ii  debconf-utils  1.5.82
ii  lsb-release    12.0-1
ii  ruby-selinux   3.4-1+b6

Versions of packages puppet-agent suggests:
pn  hiera-eyaml                            <none>
pn  puppet-module-puppetlabs-augeas-core   <none>
pn  puppet-module-puppetlabs-cron-core     <none>
pn  puppet-module-puppetlabs-host-core     <none>
pn  puppet-module-puppetlabs-mount-core    <none>
pn  puppet-module-puppetlabs-selinux-core  <none>
pn  puppet-module-puppetlabs-sshkeys-core  <none>
pn  puppet-module-puppetlabs-stdlib        <none>
ii  ruby-hocon                             1.3.1-2
pn  ruby-msgpack                           <none>

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/default/puppet changed [not included]
/etc/puppet/puppet.conf changed [not included]

-- debconf information excluded