Error applying a catalog when the agent is restarted in the middle of a catalog run

[César]

Hi all,

we have seen the following error when the puppet agent is restarted in the middle of a catalog run

Dec 20 07:19:18 helios puppet-agent[22331]: Reopening log files
Dec 20 07:19:18 helios puppet-agent[22331]: Starting Puppet client version 3.3.2
Dec 20 07:19:18 helios puppet-agent[22331]: Could not run: source did not contain any PSON!
Dec 20 07:19:19 helios puppet-agent[22329]: source did not contain any PSON!

Digging further in the issue, this error seems to occur when the agent gets an empty catalog to apply.

Puppet is configured to run every 3 minutes, but after the error is seen the agent does not recover by itself and requires another restart of the service.

Is there any setting that we are missing that would help us get rid of the problem or is it a malfunction? 

[Felix Frank]

Hi,

as a workaround, you could hopefully switch to running Puppet from cron.
This is usually more robust.

If you can reproduce this behavior, it would be great if you could
1. see if this holds true with the latest 3.8 or even 4.3 version and if
yes,
2. simplify the environment as much as possible and report this as a bug

In fact, a simple reproduction would go a long way on its own - I will
offer to take a crack at the issue if you can provide the instructions.

HTH,
Felix