Puppet

I think this is a bad idea, especially because using import is a sign that you have violated the expectations of the autoloader; those conventions are valuable to everyone using Puppet.

I could be convinced to support the extended version of globs that Ruby supports:

import "/etc/puppet/nodes/*"  # only that directory
import "/etc/puppet/nodes/**/*"  # that directory and any children

Does the autoloader support loading node files by convention? I am not aware of this. So I wouldnt agree with your assertion that using it is a sign of not following conventions.

R.I. Pienaar wrote:

Does the autoloader support loading node files by convention? I am not aware of this. So I wouldnt agree with your assertion that using it is a sign of not following conventions.

Good catch: I was thinking only of the case of import in the scope of classes and modules, not nodes. We don’t currently define a best practice solution to loading nodes by convention from disk. (Though that might be a good idea.)

Thinking about it, I stand by the rest of my statement: I would happily support an explicit “recurse” operation in import, but oppose an implicit “always recurse”. Even in the case of nodes split out separately, which is reasonable, having to be explicit about recursive importing makes more sense, I think.

I see no way of retaining backwards compatibility, and possible nastiness in store for past users of this syntax.

On the other hand, I dearly hope that there are few users that span whole trees of node manifests (but I may be wrong to).

In all, I think I’m opposed to this.

I think the idea of doing this automatically with a plain glob is horrible and should be summarily rejected.

Supporting a ruby-like ‘**’ glob is reasonable, but I prefer to develop a convention for loading nodes and keep importing very simple (or just deprecate nodes).