Puppet » Facter

I’m starting to wonder if we need an OS family fact of some kind. Feel free to open a feature request :)

There are bound to end up being differences between “proper” RedHat and the various derivatives that people need to identify, so we do need an os fact for SL.

I’m not particularly enamored with “scientific”, but it is reasonably consistent with our other os values. “debian”, “ubuntu”, etc.

Now is the time to get this fixed though… we’re going to be cutting another RC on Monday US Pacific Time.

What does the SL community refer to SL as?

This will also break the maillist and user types on SL as the providers check for all the redhat like OS.

True. We went through this pain before when we moved from identifying Ubuntu as “debian” –> “ubuntu”.

So… Is it worth identifying SL separately?

I have no problem if the consensus is to leave the redhat designation. However, it feels incorrect to me. It seems to me that if a distro requires a separate set of repos and contains different packages, it should have its own designation.

Thanks,

Jim Goddard On Mar 19, 2011 12:30 AM, tickets@puppetlabs.com wrote:

Issue #6679 has been updated by Alessandro Franceschi. Status changed from Closed to Re-opened

I just updated Facter from 1.5.8 to 1.5.9 on a Scientific Linux 6 test box and found that the operatingsystem fact changed from RedHat (yes, it was not null on my test machine) to Scientific. This practically breaks every existing module where the operatingsystem fact is used. I don’t think that’s a good idea. Consider that Sl is gaining popularity for the delays of Centos 6 , it might deserve a dedicated operatingsystem fact name but at the same time “RedHat” worked fine.

I reopen the ticket just to have confirmation that the final choice on its operatingsystem fact value is “Scientific” (which actually doesn’t seem complete) so that I’ve to correct all my modules only once.

Best regards, Alessandro Franceschi

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Bug #6679: Facter 1.5.8 does not identify Scientific Linux Author: James Goddard Status: Re-opened Priority: Low Assignee: Category: library Target version: 1.5.9 Keywords: operatingsystem Branch: https://github.com/jamtur01/facter/tree/ticket/master/6679

I just started playing with Scientific Linux 6.0, and the first thing I have noticed is that the operatingsystem fact has no flag for this distro. The relevant file is /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/facter/operatingsystem.rb, and as a first draft, I have added a clause for it (and attached):

39,40d38 < elsif txt =~ /scientific/i < “Scientific”

Thanks,

Jim Goddard

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Just a side note. I made my test on a SL6 BETA version so my operatingsystem fact evaluating to RedHat might have been due to incomplete conversion from the “upstream vendor”. So while I personally prefer a fact evaluated as “RedHat” rather than “Scientific”, I surely agree that “Scientific” is better than null (and, yes, probably “Scientific” is more appropriate than “Scientific Linux”). James after all is not wrong when saying that it feels “wrong”, also considering that, for example, CentOS is more compatible to RedHat than SL, but it’s a PITA, relatively, to update update all the references in modules or native types.

So I have no answers, only different concurrent alternatives each one with pros and cons but it’s important to settle this definitively, in some way or another.

BTW, + 1 for a sort of family breed fact. In some modules I use a custom variable, based on operatingsystem and lsb* facts for the same purpose, and I think it might be useful in the long term.