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

[Evgeni Golov]

\o

On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 10:35:22AM -0500, Antoine Beaupre wrote:
> 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.)

Today, if I install puppet-agent from Puppetlabs, I get the following
modules vendored:

# ls /opt/puppetlabs/puppet/vendor_modules/ -1
augeas_core
cron_core
host_core
mount_core
scheduled_task
selinux_core
sshkeys_core
yumrepo_core
zfs_core
zone_core

I think the same list should be present when I install puppet-agent from
Debian.

(I have no idea whether they all are already packaged as individual
packages or not.)

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

I have no strong feelings here. My personal reading of "Recommends"
always was "you really want these packages unless you know what you're
doing/missing". But I guess "Depends" stronger enforces the "this
package is compatible with what Puppetlabs ships/calls puppet-agent"

> 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.

As the modules don't pull in any more dependencies, the only real
downside is space, which I think is tolerable these days.

Thanks for maintaining puppet!

Evgeni