Packaging Issues with PuppetDB 1.6.0 and Fedora (possible SRPMs on other distros)

[Ryan Senior]

The PuppetDB 1.6.0 RPMs for Fedora are currently broken and have been
pulled from the Fedora repos. We are working on a 1.6.1 release this

week that will include a fix for the packaging issue causing the
failure. We have also received reports of rebuilt SRPMs on other
platforms having issues. Users on Fedora should stick to 1.5.2 until
PuppetDB 1.6.1 is released. More details on the issue are below.
 
The issue was originally found and documented here:
https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PDB-377 (thanks John!). Part of
the Fedora RPM packaging process includes cracking open the PuppetDB
binary JAR file and manipulating some of the code included in it. The
manipulation of these class files rendered the JAR broken in

subtle ways. The feature of unpacking/repacking the JAR is mainly
useful for JVM code that wants to take advantage of native libraries.
Since PuppetDB doesn't use native dependencies, that feature of the
packaging process doesn't provide any value. Disabling it has fixed
the issue. The binary RPMs on other platforms (i.e.

Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS) did not suffer from this issue.

-Ryan