Issue #16729 has been updated by Jeff McCune. Status changed from Unreviewed to Accepted
# Accepted Robert, Thank you for taking the time to report this issue. I'm one of the developers responsible for Puppet and Facter. My highest priority is to make sure you, and all Puppet users, have a delightful experience. I spent quite a bit of time reviewing the problem you've described, and I've identified at least one viable solution to this problem. We're still not exactly sure what we're going to do to resolve this issue, but I'd like to take a moment and assure you of the following things: First, we acknowledge and accept that this is an flaw with the way Puppet is delivered. We made a mistake with the 3.0.0 release and this mistake causes some users to unwillingly install a version of Puppet incompatible with their existing infrastructure. Specifically, we acknowledge that our users must knowingly decide to install any version of Puppet that we (Puppet Labs) knows to be incompatible with previous releases. With the move to semantic version numbers as of 3.0.0, this means that future major versions of Puppet, e.g. 4.x, will require some "opt-in" action on your behalf. Second, If a minor version or patch version is found to be incompatible with previous versions, we consider this to be a bug with Puppet and we'll work as quickly as possible to release a subsequent version to fix this incompatibility. This un-intentional backwards incompatibility will happen from time to time, we're constantly working to improve our existing QA and CI tools, but please rest assured you should trust us not to knowingly release backwards incompatible software that you might unknowingly install. Finally, we acknowledge that using `ensure => latest` inside of Puppet, or doing the equivalent of `yum install puppet` in kickstart, scripts, or cobbler doesn't qualify as knowingly deciding to upgrade across incompatible versions. Not everyone reads the documentation or our announcements, and not everyone is an expert in apt and yum. This acknowledgement applies for any system we support that has online repositories such as APT and IPS. Furthermore, there is quite a bit of documentation [1] [2] [3] that indicates this is a problem with our design. We're still not quite sure what we're going to do to resolve this issue, but we do acknowledge and accept the issue as valid and we take responsibility for resolving it. I hope this helps and thank you again for reporting this issue, -Jeff McCune [1] http://infodesign.com.au/articles/themythofthestupiduser/ [2] http://swizec.com/blog/stupid-users-are-a-myth/swizec/449 [3] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/0465067107 (page 128) ---------------------------------------- Bug #16729: When using the puppetlabs repositories, `yum install puppet` should be safe. https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/16729#change-72918 Author: Robert Rothenberg Status: Accepted Priority: High Assignee: Category: package Target version: Affected Puppet version: 3.0.0 Keywords: Branch: I work for a small company that is not yet ready to upgrade Puppet to v3. This upgrade may or may not cause problems for us (especially since we use a masterless network), but the upgrade will require us to devote time to test the upgrade. It would be much better if there were separate names for the distributions, say, puppet2. Users who want to delay upgrades can install puppet2 and use that until they are ready. # Updates JJM - I changed the title because different package names are a prescribed solution. There is at least one other alternative proposal, which is to use different repositories for incompatible releases. Whatever we decide on, yum install puppet should be safe for the end user. Releasing incompatible packages to the repository makes this unsafe for end users. # References * [Puppet Users - Puppet 2.7 v 3.0 in the PuppetLabs yum repo](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/puppet-users/Q14kTSE0pvY) * [Puppet 3.0.0 Release Announcement](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/puppet-announce/lqmTBX9XDtw/discussion) * [Puppet 3.0.0 breaking changes relative to Puppet 2.7.x](http://links.puppetlabs.com/telly_breaking_changes) -- You have received this notification because you have either subscribed to it, or are involved in it. To change your notification preferences, please click here: http://projects.puppetlabs.com/my/account -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Bugs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-bugs?hl=en.
