Puppet Platform 6 pre-release builds available

[Eric Sorenson]

Hi all, we've started landing changes for what will become Puppet Platform 6. Here's the News You Can Use relating to the release.

Scope and Timeline
We expect to release it in the fall, and the major features of the release are currently scoped to be:
- improved secret and ephemeral data handling through the use of a new API for evaluating functions an the agent at catalog application time (more on this to come, it's still pretty early in design)
- modularized types and providers; things like the nagios types will live in their own module and be included at packaging time. This will make it easier to get changes into this code and opens the door to including more modules in packages so, for example, you don't need to download stdlib separate from puppet. Josh posted a PR to the specifications repo describing this approach here: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet-specifications/pull/106
- consolidate the CA code onto the clojure CA and provide 1st class support for intermediate CA signing - this means the Ruby CA and tooling around it will change in favor of a CLI that supports your actual workflow. (PUP-7877 is the epic to follow for this work)


Branches, Builds, and Repos
The upshot is that the 'master' branch of the main platform projects (puppetdb, puppetserver, facter, puppet) will become the 6.0 versions of those projects, and PRs that target master can contain larger changes - so things like improving facter output, changing default settings for things that had previously been opt-in, etc have a place to land.
In addition to automatic builds that go into the nightly repos, we're working in iterations towards monthly milestones that contain completed features and are ready for testing and feedback. As these come out, we'll post updates to the mailing list describing the contents in more detail and would love for you to try them out and let us know how it goes.
The release packages are up here for apt/yum systems:
yum: https://yum.puppet.com/puppet6-nightly/
apt: https://apt.puppet.com/puppet6-nightly/

and the direct download repos for mac, windows, and eos are here:
http://nightlies.puppet.com/downloads/

(Note that although the content of the agent packages in particular is being built off what will become puppet 6, the version numbers won't reflect that until it's tagged as such.)
Once the release is out, the 'puppet' repo and associated release package for apt and yum will shift to 'puppet6'; the 'puppet5' repo/release package will remain as-is so you can stay pinned to that until you're ready to move.


EOL / Lifecycle of Older versions
The 5.x versions are incorporated into the upcoming PE2018.1 LTS, so the branches that feed into those versions will be open for changes. But they need to be targeted bug fixes that won't introduce instability into the components, so please be judicious when targeting non-master branches with your PRs.
The 4.x series (puppet-agent 1.10, puppet-server 2.8, etc) will be going EOL towards the end of 2018. They're already on "deep LTS" mode and only critical security fixes and hyper-targeted backports are landing on these branches.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I'm pretty excited about this release; the slightly longer development timeline and milestone build process should enable more interesting features and a smoother upgrade path.

--eric0

[a...@example42.com]

Hei Eric,
good news, especially the extra modularization and the agent side functions, from my point of view.
Are expected in Puppet 6 any remarkable backwards incompatibilities or deprecations?

Best
Al

[Eric Sorenson]

Hi Al - The main thing is that the certificate authority and network stack are going to consolidate onto the puppetserver implementations, rather than having a split between ruby/webrick and clojure/puppetserver. So if anyone is still using 'puppet master' standalone or apache-based servers, now's the time to cut the cord.