[Pkg-puppet-devel] reports retention policy

[Antoine Beaupré]

On 2024-08-28 10:54:05, Jérôme Charaoui wrote:

[...]

>
> I don't use them for anything currently, and I manage this directory 
> with a Puppet-managed cron job that deletes them after x days, as I 
> suspect most users of this package are already doing.
>
> Suddenly shipping a cron job that could conflict with existing retention 
> policies really feels like a bad thing, especially when its not 
> announced in NEWS.

I agree we should have something in NEWS here...

Right now, the situation is on *any* meaningfully sized fleet, the
server will explode a few days (or weeks, depending on the size of the
fleet) after the upgrade.

I think that's a major regression, and we should fix it. We have shipped
that regression in bookworm already, so our "current" retention policy
is *already* an undocumented change (from 30 days to "infinity"). If we
want to fix *that*, we need a stable update.

Therefore, I'm not sure I buy the argument about a policy change
anymore: we're either talking about Puppetserver 8 and trixie here, in
which case we *don't* have a retention policy, or we're talking about 7
and bookworm, in which case we *must* restore previous behavior.

> If we really don't care about diverging from how upstream ships Puppet, 
> and we agree reports aren't useful, then why not just disable them by 
> default (report = false) ? [1]

I think that's a good idea.

> Checking whether clients have applied their catalog can be done other 
> ways than checking the report timestamp, such as looking at 
> last_run_summary.yaml or PuppetDB (catalog_timestamp).
>
> I mentioned before that the documentation is silent about managing the 
> reports directory but actually it says this: "store: Stores the yaml 
> report in the configured reportdir. By default, this is the report 
> processor Puppet uses. These files collect quickly — one every half hour 
> — so be sure to perform maintenance on them if you use this report." [2]

It kind of blows my mind that this is enabled by default *and*
simultaneously not managed. That seems like a really Bad Idea.

Let's just turn off reports and teach people how to use PuppetDB in the
NEWS file, possibly fixing this to stable after a period in trixie?

-- 
Sous le projecteur, on ne voit pas les autres.
                        - Félix Leclerc