The Road to Facter 3

[Kylo Ginsberg]

As some of you know, we have been working on a native reimplementation of facter in C++11 in the https://github.com/puppetlabs/cfacter project. At the same time, we've been continuing to add features and fixes in parallel in the ruby facter project at good ol' https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter.

Starting in facter 3, we will have only the native implementation, and facter 2 will only be for bug/security fixes to the ruby implementation. This message covers some logistics around this transition, whether you're using or contributing to the facter project.

If you're using facter:

• the upcoming 1.0.x series of puppet-agent includes both (ruby) facter 2.4.x and (native) cfacter 0.4.x
• by default puppet will use facter but you can try the native implementation with puppet's '--cfacter' setting
• likewise you can A/B compare output with the 'facter' or 'cfacter' binaries
• once facter 3 is ready, a follow-on Y or Z release of puppet-agent will include just facter 3 with the native implementation, no need to type '--cfacter' or 'cfacter'

If you're contributing to facter:

• there is now a facter/2.x branch -- all PRs for bug fixes against ruby facter should be targeted here
• in the next few weeks, puppetlabs/facter repo will be the source for all facter development, i.e. native facter code / development will move to the facter repo (preserving git history)
• the puppetlabs/cfacter repo will become effectively read-only
• we won't be git-merging up from facter/2.x to facter/{stable,master} (because we can't -- it'll be different code bases)
• this will make us somewhat selective in what we merge to facter/2.x since we'll need to port it to carry the fix forward

I think that covers it. Happy fact gathering!

Kylo

--

Kylo Ginsberg | ky...@puppetlabs.com | irc: kylo | twitter: @kylog

[Roy Nielsen]

Curious - will this be able to be compiled and used on Arm or other architectures (cross platform compatibility)?

Thank you,

-Roy

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[Michael Stahnke]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Roy Nielsen <amr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Curious - will this be able to be compiled and used on Arm or other architectures (cross platform compatibility)?

I have been toying with ARM chips at home to get this working. (Not official from Puppet Labs). Thus far I haven't got it all working, but it's mostly due to versions of libraries and such and not cfacter itself. I'll keep you posted.

 

 

[Branan Riley]

"probably"

The code is written to standard operating system APIs, and we are very aggressive with our compiler warnings (which helps avoid undefined/architecture-specific behavior). I would expect it to work, but as always with C++ sometimes things get weird.

Depending on the architecture* we would probably accept pull requests to fix any issues found by the community (assuming they're of good quality, don't add too much complexity, etc - all the normal PR caveats)

-- Branan

* We wouldn't upstream support for the m68k, for example

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Roy Nielsen <amr...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Michael Smith]

As a heads up, we plan to merge https://github.com/puppetlabs/cfacter to https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter/tree/master (facter/master) this afternoon. If you're pinning against facter/master, you may want to change that to facter/2.x unless you're prepared to compile the native binary.

Specific details are available at https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/FACT-853.

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Michael Smith

Sr. Software Engineer, Puppet Labs

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[Branan Riley]

Closing the loop on this: We completed the cutover. facter/master is now native facter, and the cfacter repository is closed

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