Fixing packaging provider (pkg.rb) for Solaris

[Geoffrey Gardella]

The Solaris packaging provider fails to update packages to latest version when "latest" is specified. The method latest determines if there is a newer version of the package by doing "pkg list -Hn". There is no 'pkg refresh' executed, so a newer version in the repository will never be seen.

The latest method is superfluous in Solaris. Puppet should simply run a 'pkg update', which will automatically do a refresh as part of its action.

Since the flow is controlled by the type, not the provider, I'm wondering how I should best go about fixing this. The super-simple solution is to add a 'pkg refresh' at the beginning of the latest method. This will add time to the processing of each package, and put an undue load on the publisher in large environments. Ideally, I'ld just skip the latest method.

Any suggestions?

[Branan Riley]

This sounds super similar to the Debian Linux case, where `apt-get update` needs to be run before the package manager will list new versions of packages.

With Debian, it was decided (long before I joined the company) that Puppet shouldn't do that operation on every run - both because it can be slow to talk to another server, what to do if it fails is hard to judge, and also because admins may want to control how and when their local package database is synchronized with external servers.

The apt module provides an `apt::update` class that can be used to cause package system to be synchronized as part of a catalog application, either on a schedule or every time puppet runs. I think a similar module/class is probably called for in the Solaris world.

-- Branan

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