On May 24, 2008, at 5:59 PM, Jos Backus wrote:

This isn't pertinent to your specific problem, but maybe this  
description will help with understanding the situation and why the  
information you're getting isn't as good as it could be.

Also, note that you can download the 'puppetdoc' executable and run it  
with 'puppetdoc -r providers' to get a full report on what providers  
exist, which ones are functional, and, to the extent Puppet can tell,  
what makes them non-functional.  You can see an example report here:

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/ProviderSuitabilityReport

The 'confine' system for determining which providers are functional  
has had two good but restrictive tests available to it:

* exists: Whether a file exits
* facter: Whether a given facter value is within the specified array

You can see that if these tests fail, then we can easily log what's  
wrong.  However, they're not sufficient to test for all cases, so  
there are two other tests:

* true: Whether a value is true
* false: Whether a value is false

This would be used for things like what the ldap providers now do:

confine :false => (Puppet[:ldapuser] == "")

I.e., this ldap provider is only functional if the ldapuser setting  
has been set to something other than its default empty string.

You can see that it would be essentially impossible to usefully log  
what the failure is here, without some additional information.

I recognize the pain of this, and I've just entirely refactored the  
Confine system, pulling it into separate classes and thus making it  
easier to extend.

For instance, I upgraded the facter test so it can now test both facts  
and settings (preferring settings, but there's very little overlap):

   confine :ldapport => "389"

This still doesn't work for my above test, because I need to test a  
negative, but still, it's better.

The next step would be allow for inclusion of a string that describes  
the failure, something like:

confine "Missing X file" => { :true => FileTest.exist?("/my/file") }

I don't really know what the right interface is.

If someone's willing to go through the existing confines and play with  
some ways of specifying all of them so that they can be logged better,  
it should be easy to provide this better interface.

--
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
     -- H. L. Mencken
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com