is a change of fqdn_rand to return a numeric a breaking change?

[Henrik Lindberg]

In ticket https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-4698 it is suggested
that fqdn_rand should change its return value to be a numeric value
instead of a string since it is common to compare it to a value later
and string comparison never falls back to a numeric comparison with
future parser/puppet 4.0.0.

In a strict sense, fixing this bug is a breaking change and would have
to wait until puppet 5.0.0. OTOH, the consequence is that some may be
silently bitten because there is no error, only that logic takes a
different part because of a string compare instead of a numeric compare.

What says the people here? Is this a breaking change that has to wait
until puppet 5.0.0, or can this be done for puppet 4.x ?

- henrik
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[Jeff McCune]

I think it can be done for Puppet 4 provided the value doesn't change, only the representation or type.  For example if fqdn_rand on host A went from returning "5" to 5, I think that's fine, but if moves from "5" to 6 on host A then that's not OK.

With this said, I don't actually use this so please put my feedback behind anyone who relies on the behavior.

-Jeff

[Erik Dalén]

I would see the wrong return type a a bug, so fixing it is not a API change. AFAIK something similar was done with some facts that had the wrong type between facter 2.2.x and 2.3.x.

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[Daniel Dreier]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 3:46 PM, Henrik Lindberg <henrik....@cloudsmith.com> wrote:

In ticket https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-4698 it is suggested that fqdn_rand should change its return value to be a numeric value instead of a string since it is common to compare it to a value later and string comparison never falls back to a numeric comparison with future parser/puppet 4.0.0.

In a strict sense, fixing this bug is a breaking change and would have to wait until puppet 5.0.0. OTOH, the consequence is that some may be silently bitten because there is no error, only that logic takes a different part because of a string compare instead of a numeric compare.

What says the people here? Is this a breaking change that has to wait until puppet 5.0.0, or can this be done for puppet 4.x ? 

 

Just as another data point, I did a quick review of the puppetlabs operations codebase and I'm pretty confident it won't cause problems for us. Would be good to hear from others, though.

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Daniel Dreier

Technical Operations Engineer

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