Puppet » Facter

We have a few issues with Facter being unable to report individual facts properly.

Take this, for example:

dev-box:~# facter lsbdistdescription
dev-box:~# facter | grep lsbdistdescription
lsbdistdescription => Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.3 (lenny)

dev-box:~# facter memoryfree
dev-box:~# facter | grep memoryfree
memoryfree => 390.38 MB

Whereas this and nearly every other fact work:

dev-box:~# facter rubysitedir
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8
dev-box:~# facter facterversion
1.5.1
dev-box:~# facter kernelrelease
2.6.26-2-amd64

It appears that it’s not properly loading the lsb facts, along with several others, when requested directly.

For our internal builds of facter, I was able to get this to work as we’d expect by forcing Facter to load all facts first like this (line 123, /usr/bin/facter):

120 if names.empty?
121     facts = Facter.to_hash
122 else
123     Facter.loadfacts
124     facts = {}
125     names.each { |name|
126         begin
127             facts[name] = Facter.value(name)
128         rescue => error
129             STDERR.puts "Could not retrieve %s: #{error}" % name
130             exit 10
131         end
132     }
133 end

Loading all facts to retrieve whatever is in ARGV seems a bit excessive and, depending on the facts on that machine, can take a long time. Was there some magic that I’m missing that would allow Facter to just load an individual fact, or is this a sane fix?