Deprecation notice for (many) NextGen Modules

[Alessandro Franceschi]

As you may have noticed the activities on several Example42 modules have been stale for a while: rspec tests to fix, pending bugs and PR and obsoleting code (The second generation of Example42 modules ("NextGen") has been designed in pre-Puppet3 times).
I order to avoid the ridiculous bottleneck of having just one person (me) maintaining more than 100 modules, it has been created, a few months ago, the Example42 organisation on GitHub which is open to whoever wants to maintain some modules (http://www.example42.com/2014/10/13/example42_goes_org/).

Now we are taking one step further: several modules, which hadn't a maintainer, have been officially deprecated and won't be actively maintained any more, unless new maintainers propose themselves for the role.

If you are using these modules, don't despair: if they worked well for you they will continue to do, at least with Puppet versions earlier than 4.

You can consider Tiny Puppet as alternative (https://github.com/example42/puppet-tp), migrate to other modules or fix and patch the module as you need.

Even better, consider eventually the possibility to maintain the modules you use and save them from deprecation.

In the current Example42 modules repository https://github.com/example42/puppet-modules we have created a new branch: 2.0, where we have "NextGen" modules as git submodules. The master branch will get rid of the deprecated modules and eventually include also modules from third party authors, so expect radical change on this repository.

The full list of Example42 modules, with indication of status and maintainers is here: https://github.com/example42/tp-playground/blob/master/bin/example42modules.txt 

Looking forward to hear any feedback on these decisions about Ex42 modules.

Best,
Alessandro Franceschi

[Sean Alderman]

Hi Alessandro,

I just wanted to offer that I've appreciated all your efforts with these modules over the past few years.  I hope my small contributions along the way have been helpful, but still I am a novice. 

We've setup our entire linux and solaris infrastructure based on your modules and the monitoring and firewall integration that they provide.  I know exported resources aren't optimal for large deployments but at the moment they're working well for us.  I'm looking at either maintaining these integrated modules and adding EL7 support or moving on to another strategy that preserves the integrity and accountability of our infrastructure.  We also use TheForeman as Puppet ENC, so there is a similar uncertainty that future releases of puppet will bring there as well.

Anyway, thank for all your hard work!

[Alessandro Franceschi]

HI Sean,

thanks for your reply, and your support in these years, and sorry for this late reply.

One of my concerns when decided to discontinue the support of so many modules was actually for cases like yours, where Ex42 modules are widely used and there's is the need to keep up with updates with them.

Support for new OS is easy, and I don't expect much to do for EL7 and, more generally, if something works there's no urgency to change it.

There'll be a moment when those modules will probably be unusable, that is when it's time to migrate to Puppet4.

I'm actually slowing adapting params_lookup to Puppet4, but time is really scarce here and I'm not sure it's really worth the effort.
Follow her the updates, in case: https://github.com/example42/puppi/issues/123

All the best,

Alessandro