[Labs-l] List of packages that are supported by tool labs

[Petr Bena]

I am not talking about "list of installed packages" I am talking about
"list of packages that were already requested by other users, are in
puppet and guaranteed to be present, so that you don't need to bother
us with requesting them again, because they were already requested and
are installed"

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 4:35 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc at uberbox.org> wrote:
> On 11/07/2013 10:26 AM, Petr Bena wrote:
>> From what Tim said, it seems that I should fill in a bug report for
>> every single package no matter if it's already in puppet or not,
>> because there is clearly no simple way for me to verify that.
>
> Yes, you should, because otherwise you're relying on implicit
> dependencies, which is iffy at best.  If you have a tool that needs
> libfoo-perl, then you need to make sure libfoo-perl is puppetized and
> not rely on the fact that foobar-tools happens to have it as a
> dependency and it got installed as a consequence.
>
> OTOH, never request installation of dependencies of things you depend
> on; rely on apt to work those out itself.
>
> In other words, if your tool invokes 'gizmo' from the package 'gizmo',
> list *that* as a dependency, and not the 'libgizmo' it depends on in
> turn - you never know when gizmo will switch to libwidget instead.
>
> This is why making or comparing a "list of installed packages" is
> exactly the wrong way to go about things -- there might be things
> leftover on nodes from previous versions, or things that were installed
> but then never removed (changes in puppet, in general, do not purge
> packages no longer explicitly installed).
>
> -- Marc
>
>
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