Puppet users - Sep 2013 - Module team update: 2013-08-09 - 2013-09-03

Going forward I''m going to aim for this twice a month as weekly is too
frequent and I forget to write them every week.

This update is dedicated to blkperl who keeps me writing them by reminding
me every time I forget.

It''s been a busy month and with Puppetconf falling in the middle of the
month progress has been a bit all over the place.  Our focus this month has
been on connecting with the community, discussing module standards,
testing, and all the stuff around the edges of modules.

One piece of solid work that''s come out of this is the "Beginners
Guide to
Modules", the very beginning piece of our drive towards having a coherent
set of module documentation that covers everything from how a beginner
should lay out a module to best practices for types/providers, all the way
to testing frameworks.  Obviously this is a new thing for us so you''ll
have
to help us to help you by giving us awesome feedback on how to improve the
guide and what information you would most like to see Puppetlabs
standardize and define next.

The guide is at http://links.puppetlabs.com/bgtm and we''ll be working
to
clean it up, move it to our real documentation site and get space built for
us to write more.

I''ve already done some more work towards an Advanced guide and towards
some
blog posts to showcase existing modules (like stdlib) and other techniques
to help you improve modules.

RELEASES:

Not as many releases this month, we''re sort of focused on other areas
and
groundwork to make this easier going forward:

http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/nodejs/0.4.0
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/firewall/0.4.1
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/concat/1.0.0
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/gcc/0.1.0
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/rabbitmq/3.0.0
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/ntp/2.0.0

From other groups:
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/puppetdb/1.6.0
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/gce_compute/0.1.0 - from google!

WORK IN PROGRESS

Hunter has been working on puppetlabs-apache, merging in endless PRs and
helping to improve that module even more.  Alongside that he''s working
on
"beaker", the previously named puppet-acceptance framework. 
We''re looking
to adopt it for testing modules but we''re in the middle of learning
about
it and figuring out how to best adopt it so it''s easy for community
members
to get going with.

The earlier part of the month was taken up with Puppetconf prep for his
talk (which I heard was awesome and enjoyed by all!)  He also made
https://github.com/hunner/roles_and_profiles as part of this, so check that
out.

Ken (honorary member of the module team this week!) has completely
refactored puppetlabs-postgresql and has a massive pull request in
completely overhauling the module.  It looks fantastic and will be vastly
easier to work with and ensure that we don''t have weird dependency
issues
going forward.

Ashley (me) has been in the weeds in the MySQL module for a while now.
 I''ve written some new types: mysql_user, mysql_db, mysql_grant to
replace
the existing ones that had a number of issues that were making working with
this module difficult.  The new ones can all be called with "puppet
resource" allowing you to manipulate mysql via puppet without having to use
manifests.  They all have various improvements and will underlie the
refactoring work that I plan to do in the MySQL module in the next few
weeks.  Puppetconf made it very clear to me that the community cares deeply
about the MySQL module but many people fork it off due to the difficulty
with adding your own configuration params, installation sources, and
general ability to tweak the module without difficulty.

One of the reasons I''ve been working on the providers and types is to
make
sure I have fresh pain in my mind before I start writing some beginner
provider/types documentation for the module team.  MySQL has proven to be
an absolute nightmare to write these types for so I''m full of pain
points
to touch on to make sure the rest of you have an easier time in the future.

-- 
Ashley Penney
ashley.penney@puppetlabs.com
Module Engineer

*Join us at PuppetConf 2014, September 23-24 in San Francisco*

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Puppet Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to puppet-users+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.