Fixing Puppet in Fedora/EPEL

[Michael Stahnke]

Puppet in the Fedora/EPEL ecosystem is a bit wonky currently.

I'd really like to fix it.

Problems:
* Fedora 17 (and higher) ships with Ruby 1.9.x and Puppet 2.7.x.  2.7.x is not
  100% compatible with 1.9.3. The number of issues in this space continues to
  grow.
* EPEL 5/6 still have Puppet 2.6.x in stable.  This version of Puppet
isn't maintained any more, other than security fixes.
* Puppet 3.0.x is out and is the fully supported branch from Puppet Labs and
  supports Ruby 1.9.3+ fully.
* People wanting to have to Fedora clients (agents) check into a RHEL
master have  to either replace all Puppet software with items provided
by yum.puppetlabs.com
  or replace Fedora ruby/puppet with the ones from RHEL/EPEL.

My proposal would be the following:
* Move EPEL 6, Fedora >= 17 to use Puppet 3.0.
* Move EPEL 5 to the latest 2.7.x branch.  This is the last branch of
Puppet that supports Ruby 1.8.5, and works with 3.0 masters.

This would cause some backward-incompatible changes as documented here[1].

However, this would provide the longest life of Puppet on RHEL/Fedora
ecosystems and allow users of Puppet to continue to develop solutions around it
on RHEL/EPEL/Fedora, such as the Red Hat Openstack work.  We would obviously
want to allow testing for some time before pushing the changes everywhere.

Puppet Labs release engineering is more than willing to do a majority of this
work to make this happen.

[1] http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Release_Notes#Important-Deprecations

Michael Stahnke
stahnma on freenode
Puppet Labs Software Delivery