[Labs-l] Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty image now available (mostly)

[Andrew Bogott]

I've just removed the "(testing)" from the labs Trusty image.  That 
image should now be safe and reliable for most uses.  If you don't care 
about Ruby, Rails, or Puppet, then feel free to dive in! Otherwise, read 
on...

Puppet:

     At the moment, default Trusty VMs run the same version of Puppet as 
the old Precise images.  So, no surprises there.  In some cases puppet 
classes that work just fine on Precise may malfunction due to mismatched 
Trusty package versions.  I haven't seen a lot of those cases so far, 
but it's something to be wary of.

Role::Puppet::Self:

     At the moment this doesn't work on Trusty at all.  Trusty wants to 
install puppet master version 3, which causes a great dependency cascade 
which ultimately threatens to uninstall the puppet client and break 
everything.  We're working on a couple of possible solutions to this, 
but in the meantime you should just avoid using Trusty as a puppetmaster 
or a puppet test box.

Ruby, Rails, etc:

     Our default Trusty VMs come standard with Ruby installed.  It is, 
however, a forwarded-ported version that is /not/ standard for Trusty.  
That means that if you install anything that depends on Ruby then apt 
will try to upgrade your Ruby version which will break a bunch of 
things, including puppet, and probably result in the box being 
unusable.  So... when installing packages keep an eye out for such warnings.

     In not all that long (a month or so, perhaps?) we'll be upgrading 
all of our infrastructure to puppet 3, in which case all of these 
version-conflict issues should be neatly resolved.  At that point I'll 
also switch Trusty over to the default base image; until then I still 
regard Precise as the safe choice.


     If you encounter any difficulties with this image outside of the 
above, I'd like to hear about them!  Please respond to this thread with 
details.

-Andrew