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

Thu Nov 7 15:35:32 UTC 2013

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