| Historically, the -puppet and -p flags were offered by the Facter CLI to enable loading and reporting custom facts that had been downloaded from a Puppet Server by the Puppet Agent. But, the output of facter --puppet does not include values added by the puppet agent to facts submitted with catalog requests and can produce incorrect output when fact resolution is sensitive to the Puppet Environment as a compiler scope is not initialized. These issues led to the -puppet flag being deprecated in favor of the puppet facts show CLI in Puppet 7 and Facter 4. However, the --puppet flag has a very long history in Facter, having been added in 2008. This history has created a large diaspora of facter --puppet usage in scripts that are not sensitive to the issues fixed by puppet facts show because they are invoked on agent systems that don't host multiple environments or request fact values that are by the context of a puppet agent run. In order to smooth upgrades to Puppet 7 by avoiding a search-and-replace operation to locate existing uses of facter --puppet, this ticket is a request to restore the functionality of the flag in Facter 4. |
