[DRE-maint] Bug#924409: removing hiera from debian? or do not ship with buster

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos]

Control: severity -1 important
Control: tags -1 - buster
Control: retitle -1 hiera should be removed after Buster is released

Hi,

On 13:07 Tue 12 Mar     , Antoine Beaupre wrote:
> I see that Hiera in Puppet is at version 3.2.0 in buster. That's at
> least two minor versions behind upstream, which is (unofficially) at
> 3.5:
> 
> https://github.com/puppetlabs/hiera/releases
> 
> That said, Hiera itself is deprecated as a standalone system: Hiera 5
> has been part of Puppet since 4.9:
> 
> https://puppet.com/docs/hiera/3.3/index.html
> 
> The Hiera README on GitHub says the same:
> 
> https://github.com/puppetlabs/hiera/blob/master/README.md
> 
> "This project is deprecated in favor of Hiera version 5 which is
> implementation in Puppet."
> 
> Since Buster will likely ship with Puppet 5.5 (or later), it doesn't
> seem to make sense to ship Hiera in buster and it should be
> removed. It could also be removed from unstable as well, but I wanted
> to checkin with maintainers here first before filing a formal removal.

Puppet currently lists `hiera` (3) as a runtime dependency in its 
gemspec[1]. This is to provide backward compatibility until users 
manually upgrade[2] their Puppet manifests, as Hiera 3 and Hiera 5 are 
incompatible.

Since Hiera 5 was introduced after Stretch was released, we should keep 
plain `hiera` around for Buster to allow users to upgrade in a 
non-disruptive fashion. Of course we should document all of this on the 
release notes :)

I'm lowering severity to non-RC, but keeping the bug around with an 
updated title so that we can remove hiera after Buster's release.

Thanks,
Apollon

[1] https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/master/.gemspec#L35
[2] https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.3/hiera_migrate.html