proposal: webserver/site configs in puppet

[seth vidal]

Hi folks,
 A problem I've been having recently is how we configure/maintain our
webserver configs in puppet. Right now we use a common class that has
definitions for a all the common functions/setups we use for our apache
setups. It's good from a programmatic code-reuse standpoint to make sure
we're not having to make N edits all over the place. It's bad b/c it
makes it next to impossible to know that when you edit

httpd::proxy in modules/httpd/manifests/init.pp that you're going to
impact the following systems:
 proxy*
 puppet*
 collab*
 secondary*

Since we run so many different kinds of websites and types of website
services I'm going suggest we stop thinking of 'httpd' as the base layer
and start thinking of the name of website itself as the base layer.

so instead of 'httpd' the module you'd care about would be:

'infrastructure.fedoraproject.org'

or

'proxy.fedoraproject.org'

etc, etc


The advantage is - if I want to modify infrastructure - I don't have to
worry if my modification will change things on other systems I'm not
aware of. It lets people make changes quickly, safe and confident that
they are only modifying the site they think they are modifying.

The disadvantage is we may have to make certain kinds of changes in a
number of places when we want to make a change. 

I personally, think I'm better at running git-grep to know where else
has the same config than I am at parsing puppet configs in my head to
know what is or is not actually using a specific import.

I'm not sold on how this dir structure should be setup, yet and I'm
curious for some feed back.

thoughts?

-sv