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Tip of the Week 31 - Request for Feedback - sort_merged_arrays fix and problems with older Puppet versions

With Puppet 4.10.5 and 5.0.2 a fix for a missing functionality was released: sort_merged_arrays lookup option.

In earlier versions of Puppet this was named ‘sort_merge_arrays’ but lacked the functionality.

Unluckily Puppet did not build the fix with backward compatibility.

When using ‘sort_merge_arrays’ the following will happen:

  • Puppet 4.10.4/5.0.1 or earlier: success - but no functionality
  • Puppet 4.10.5/5.0.2 or later: compiler failure

When using ‘sort_merged_arrays’ the following will happen:

  • Puppet 4.10.4/5.0.1 or earlier: compiler failure
  • Puppet 4.10.5/5.0.2 or later: success - with functionality

How to work around this version dependent functionality when providing code for multiple Puppet versions?

We have a pull request on GitHub with a really ugly hack:

  1. identify version of Puppet and set a variable
  2. use this variable as a hierarchy in hiera.yaml
  3. add new hierarchy with corrected spelling of sort_merged_arrays

Let’s look at details:

manifests/site.pp

# Puppet 4.10.4 and older had a typo in sort_merged_array lookup option
# to allow functinonality we add a new hierarchy to profile hiera.yaml where we use the wrong name
if versioncmp('4.10.4', $facts['puppetversion']) >= 0 {
  $fix_sort_merge = '4'
} else {
  $fix_sort_merge = undef
}

site/profile/hiera.yaml

---
version: 5

defaults:
  datadir: data
  data_hash: yaml_data

hierarchy:
  - name: "In module hierarchy"
    paths:
      - "%{facts.virtual}.yaml"
      - "%{facts.os.name}-%{facts.os.release.major}.yaml"
      - "%{facts.os.name}.yaml"
      - "%{facts.os.family}-%{facts.os.release.major}.yaml"
      - "%{facts.os.family}.yaml"
      - "common%{fix_sort_merge}.yaml"
      - "common.yaml"

site/profile/data/common.yaml

lookup_options:
  "^profile::(.*)::(.*)_hash$":
    merge:
      strategy: deep
      knockout_prefix: "--"
      sort_merged_arrays: true
  "^profile::(.*)::(.*)::(.*)_hash$":
    merge:
      strategy: deep
      knockout_prefix: "--"
      sort_merged_arrays: true
  "^profile::(.*)::(.*)_list$":
    merge:
      strategy: deep
      knockout_prefix: "--"
      sort_merged_arrays: true
  "^profile::(.*)::(.*)::(.*)_list$":
    merge:
      strategy: deep
      knockout_prefix: "--"
      sort_merged_arrays: true

site/profile/common4.yaml

---
lookup_options:
  "^profile::(.*)::(.*)_hash$":
    merge:
      strategy: deep
      knockout_prefix: "--"
      sort_merge_arrays: true
  "^profile::(.*)::(.*)::(.*)_hash$":
    merge:
      strategy: deep
      knockout_prefix: "--"
      sort_merge_arrays: true
  "^profile::(.*)::(.*)_list$":
    merge:
      strategy: deep
      knockout_prefix: "--"
      sort_merge_arrays: true
  "^profile::(.*)::(.*)::(.*)_list$":
    merge:
      strategy: deep
      knockout_prefix: "--"
      sort_merge_arrays: true

All this is already part of a PR for PSICK.

We are interested to learn about any other - less ugly - solution.

We wish successful unit and integration tests on your control-repositories.

Martin Alfke