Background

This module was initally developed by Lance Albertson and some other guys from OSUOSL. Adrien Thebo, who by the way works for PuppetLabs, stepped in after some time and did some cleanup in the native types/providers that were included in there, and later he took over completely. Judging from the commit log though, the module was not getting the love it deserved

Meanwhile, we, the Gentoo Infrastructure team, decided to migrate from Cfengine 2 to Puppet. So I started digging around to check about Gentoo support in Puppet. Given the complexity of the package management in Gentoo, I didn’t have high expectations, and I wasn’t wrong. The internal Puppet Portage provider has pretty basic support, so I had to get my hands dirty and write something decent. Then I stumbled upon Adrien’s puppet-portage repo, which made me felt like I hit the jackpot. I started testing it to understand the functionality it covers, and meanwhile I spent some time reading books and experimenting with Puppet and Ruby, as both of them were pretty new to me.

Right after the Gentoo Miniconf I finally contacted Adrien and expressed my interest in developing more functionality to the module. In 3 – 4 months of hard work we managed to have all the functionality I had in mind, which is impressive. It was a great journey, as I had the chance to do quite some stuff in a technology that was completely unknown to me. Adrien was very helpful in giving me correct directions, and I even managed to write a native type and provider from scratch! Thanks a lot Adrien!

Special thanks also to Zac Medico, main Portage developer, for all his valuable input.

Features

Let’s see all the functionality this module provides. Most of the info below is stolen from the README file.

1) /etc/portage/package.*/*

There is a set of native providers that add support of handling entries for
/etc/portage/package.keywords, /etc/portage/package.use, /etc/portage/package.mask, /etc/portage/package.unmask. Examples:

package_use { 'app-admin/puppet':
  use     => ['flag1', 'flag2'],
  target  => 'puppet-flags',
  version => '>=3.0.1',
  ensure  => present,
}

“$use” can be either a string or an array of strings.

package_keywords { 'app-admin/puppet':
  keywords => ['~x86', '-hppa'],
  target   => 'puppet',
  version  => '>=3.0.1',
  ensure   => present,
}

“$keywords” can be either a string or an array of strings.

package_unmask { 'app-admin/puppet':
  target  => 'puppet',
  version => '>=3.0.1',
  ensure  => present,
}

package_mask { 'app-admin/puppet':
  target  => 'tree',
  version => '>=3.0.1',
  ensure  => present,
}

A few issues for the above providers (all the issues are reported in the repo’s Github tracker, but we decided to leave them for the next milestone)

• Renaming the target leaves an empty file behind
• Wrong permissions in package.*/* files: This is actually solved for newly created files, we need to find a way to enforce sane permissions to all files under /etc/portage though
• Trigger rebuild after package_* addition/edit: The portage_* providers don’t trigger rebuild, but portage::package (which is described below) does trigger proper rebuilds
• package_* should always use default values when their attributes are not explicitly specified
• package_* types do not update version when it was not initially defined
• integration tests need to cover the cases of adding removing attributes: Those last three issues are related
• Automatically convert old package.* files to dirs: This is probably not going to be fixed. In short, the Portage module works only if /etc/portage/package.* are directories. If any of those is a file, it will print an error. For now you should convert any package.* files there to directories manually. A bash script to do it quickly:

for target in keywords use mask unmask; do
    if [[ -f /etc/portage/package.$target ]]; then
        mv /etc/portage/package.$target /etc/portage/package.${target}_bak
        mkdir /etc/portage/package.$target
        mv /etc/portage/package.${target}_bak /etc/portage/package.$target/old
    fi
done

2) make.conf

NOTE: Be aware that make.conf has changed location, from /etc/make.conf to /etc/portage/make.conf. Make sure to update your systems as well. It’s new location makes much more sense. The Portage module uses by default the new location by default.

The Portage module provides a custom class to handle your entries in make.conf. Example:

portage::makeconf { 'use':
  content => 'flag1 flag2 flag3'
}

This entry will also trigger rebuild of the affected packages.

portage::makeconf { 'gentoo_mirrors':
  content => 'url1 url2'
}

As stated in issue #56, in a later milestone we will convert this class to a native type/provider, in order to make it more powerful.

3) portage::package

This is another custom class, which acts as a wrapper to the native package resource of Puppet. The following example sums up pretty much all of its functionality:

portage::package { 'app-admin/puppet':
  use              => ['-minimal', 'augeas'],
  use_version      => '>=3.0.1',
  keywords         => ['~amd64', '~x86'],
  keywords_version => '>=3.0.1',
  mask             => '<=2.3.17',
  unmask           => '>=3.0.1',
  target           => 'puppet',
  target_keywords  => 'puppet-keywords',
  ensure           => '3.0.1',
}

• If no $target_{keywords,use,mask,unmask} is specified, then the value of $target is being used.
• The variables keywords, mask and unmask also accept the special value ‘all’, that will create versionless entries. (This applies only to portage::package, if you want versionless entries in any of the above package_* types, you can just omit the version attribute.)
• Any change in portage::package will also trigger the appropriate re-emerge to the affected package.

This class was my ultimate functionality request for Portage support in Puppet generally, thus it’s the part I’ve spent most of my time on.

4) Facts

All make.conf variables and most of the eselect modules are shown by facter:

...
eselect_profile => hardened/linux/amd64
eselect_python => python3.2
eselect_ruby => ruby19
...
portage_portage_tmpdir => /var/tmp
portage_portdir => /usr/portage
portage_python_single_target => python2_7
portage_python_targets => python2_7 python3_2
portage_ruby_targets => ruby19
portage_sync => rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage
...

Keep in mind though that some of the eselect modules are not being shown as facts on purpose. The reason is that either they are not useful, or they produce too complex output that needs further investigation on how to implement. The blacklisted eselect modules are ‘help’, ‘usage’, ‘version’, ‘bashcomp’, ‘env’, ‘fontconfig’, ‘modules’, ‘news’ and ‘rc’.

5) eselect

The eselect type/provider checks for the current state of an eselect module by reading the variable of the equivalent fact. Examples:

eselect { 'ruby':
  set => 'ruby19',
}

For eselect modules that have submodules (eg php):

eselect { 'php_apache2':
  set => 'php5.3',
}

This pretty much covers everything. I hope it will be useful for the community. Feel free to submit bugs, patches or ideas at the repo’s Github issue tracker.

This weekend 2 and 3 of March 2013 an annual FOSS event is going to take place in Prague, called InstallFest. This is a Czech event, organized by Petr Hodač, who was also co-organizing the LinuxDays, the Czech event that was collocated with the Gentoo Miniconf and the openSUSE Conference. InstallFest is consists of some presentations, but the main goal is to have workshops and hacking activities. All the presentations are in Czech, so I’ll be sitting alone somewhere pretending to understand the topic. Michal is going to give a talk about Puppet on Saturday morning at , and Tomáš is hosting a full Gentoo day activity on Saturday. The official website (Czech only) has the full schedule along with the full history of the event. Looking forward to it!

In the last few weeks, the conference team has worked hard to prepare the conference. The main news items you should be awere of are the FAQ which has been published, the party locations and times, the call to organize BoF sessions and of course the sponsors who help make the event possible. And we’re happy to tell you that we will provide live video streams from the main rooms during the event (!!!) and we announced the Round Table sessions during the Future Media track. Last but not least, there have been some interviews with intresting speakers in the schedule!

Sneak Peek of the Conference Schedule

Let’s start with the interviews. During the last weeks, a number of interesting speakers has been interviewed, both by text and over video chat. You can find the interviews in our first sneak peek article and more in this extensive follow-up article about the Future Media track. You can find the video interviews also in our youtube channel and on our blip.tv channel.

Video!

Talking about video interviews, there will be more videos in those channels: the openSUSE Video team is gearing up to tape the talks at the event. They will even provide a live stream of the event, which you can watch via flash and on a smartphone at bambuser and via these three links via ogv feeds: Room Kirk Room McCoy and Room Scotty. Keep an eye on the wiki page as the team will add feeds to more rooms if we can get some more volunteers to help us out.

Round Table Sessions!

We’ve mentioned the special feature track ‘Future Media’ already and we’ve got an extra bite for you all: the track will feature two round table discussions, one about the value of Free and Open for our Society and one about the practicalities of doing ‘open’ projects. Find more in the schedule: Why open matters and How do you DO open?.

We need YOU!

Despite all our work, this event would be nothing without YOUR help. We’re still looking for volunteers to sign up but there’s another thing we need you for: be pro-active and get the most out of this event! That means not only sitting in the talks but also stepping up and participating in the BoF Sessions. And organize a BoF if you think there’s something to discuss!

Party time!

Of course, we’re also thinking about the social side of the event. Yes, there will surely be an extensive “hallway track” as we feature a nice area with booths and the university has lots of hallways… But sometimes it’s just nice to sit down with someone over a good beer, and this is where our parties come in. As this article explains, there will be two parties: one on Friday, as warming-up (and pre-registration) and one on Saturday, rockin’ in the city center of Prague. Note that you will need your badge to enter this party, which means you have to be registered!

Sponsors

As we wrote a few days ago, all this would not be possible without our sponsors, and we’d like to thank them A LOT for their support!

Big hugs to Platinum Sponsor SUSE, Gold Sponsor Aeroaccess, Silver Sponsor Google, Bronze Sponsor B1Systems, supporters ownCloud and Univention and of course our media partners LinuxMagazine and Root.cz. Last but not least, a big shout-out to the university which is providing this location to us!

FaQ

On a practical level, we also published our Conference FAQ answering a bunch of questions you might have about the event. If you weren’t sure about someting, check it out!

More

There will be more news in the coming days, be sure to keep an eye on news.opensuse.org for articles leading up and of course during the event. As one teaser, we’ve got the Speedy Geeko and Lightning talks schedule coming soon!

Be there!

Gentoo Miniconf, oSC12 and LinuxDays will take place at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The campus is located in the Dejvice district and is next to an underground station that gets you directly to the historic city center – an opportunity you can’t miss!

We expect to welcome about 700 Open Source developers, testers, usability experts, artists and professional attendees to the co-hosted conferences! We work together making one big, smashing event! Admission to the conference is completely free. However for oSC a professional attendee ticket is available that offers some additional benefits.

All the co-hosted conferences will start on October 20th. Gentoo Miniconf and Linuxdays end on October 21st, while the openSUSE Conference ends on October 23rd. See you there!

Gentoo Miniconf: It will take place on Saturday and Sunday with a plethora of amazing talks by experienced Developers and Contributors, all around Gentoo, targeting both desktop and server environments!

On Saturday morning Fabian Groffen, Gentoo Council member, along with Robin H. Johnson, member of the Board of Trustees, will give us a quick view of how those two highest authorities manage the whole project. Afterwards there are going to be a few talks regarding various topics, like managing your home directory, the KDE team workflow, the important topic of Security and a benchmarking suite, all performed by important people for the project. A cool Catalyst workshop will be next, followed by a workshop regarding Gentoo Prefix, and at the end we’re going to participate on BoFs regarding the Infrastructure and the Gentoo PR, which will cover hot topics, like the Git migration and our website. 

On Sunday we’ll see how a large company (IsoHunt) uses Gentoo, the tools it has developed and the problems it has encountered. Then, a cool talk about 3D games and graphic performance is going to take place, followed by a presentation on SHA1 and OpenPGP, which is the precursor of the Key Signing Party!! The second part of the Catalyst workshop is next, along with a Puppet workshop. At the end there are again two BoFs, the first about automated testing and the second about how we can grab more contributors and enlarge our cool project.

And a sneak peek on the other co-hosted conferences:

Future Media, which will be held on Saturday is a special feature track talking about the influence of developments in technology, social media and design on society. It will have talks like the future of Wikipedia and Open Data in general by Lydia Pintscher or using FOSS and open hardware for disaster relief by Shane Couglan.

The first day in the openSUSE Conference, Michael Meeks will tell you all aboutwhat’s new in LibreOffice, Klaas Freitag will give everyone a peek under the hood of ownCloud and for the more technical users, Stefan Seyfried will show you how to crash the Linux Kernel for fun and backtraces. Saturday night there’ll be a good party and the next day musician Sam Aaron will talk about Zen and how to Live Program music like he did during the party. Later, Libor Pecháček will explain the process of getting software from the community into commercial enterprises and at the end of the day Miguel Angel Barajas Watson will show us how a computer could win Jeopardy using SUSE, Power and Hadoop. The openSUSE event continues on Monday and Tuesday with many workshops and BoF sessions planned as well as a few large-room discussions about the future of the openSUSE development- and release process.

On Saturday the LinuxDays track features a number of Czech talks like an introduction to Gentoo by Tomáš Chvátal with his talk titled “if it moves, compile it!” (‘Pokud se to hýbe, zkompiluj to!’). Fedora is represented by Jiří Eischmann & Jaroslav Řezník later in the day. There also few real ninja-style talks about low-level programming like Petr Baudiš about low level programming and Thomas Renninger on modern CPU power usage monitoring (these both are in English). During the Saturday there will also be track of graphics workshops in Czech (Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus) followed by a 3D printing workshop (reprap!). Sunday is kicked of by Vojtěch Trefný explaining how to use Canonical’s Launchpad as a place to host your project (CZ). Those interested in networking will be taken care off by Pavel Šimerda (news from Linux Networking) and Radek Neužil who explains how to use networks securely (both CZ). You can also learn all about how to set up a Linux desktop/server solution for educational purposes (EN) and follow Vladimír Čunát talking about NixOS and the unique package manager this OS is build on. The LinuxDays track will be closed by Petr Krčmář (chief editor of root.cz) and Tomáš Matějíček (author of Slax) talking about future of Slax (CZ).

Find your way to your favorite talks. Come on, it’s easy!

P.S. To avoid confusion, I’m reminding everyone that the Gentoo Miniconf and the czech Linuxdays conference will be held on 20-21 October, while the openSUSE Conference has two extra days, so it will be held on 20-23 October

P.S.2 Thanks a lot to Joanna Malkogianni and Triantafyllia Androulidaki for the pacman banner

P.S.3 Thanks a lot to Anna Mineeva for the animated banner