[Puppet-users] sharing modules scalably

[The Anarcat]

Hi,

[First, a quick introduction... I'm one of the sysadmins at Koumbit.org,
and we're evaluating puppet for managing our modest server farm. I've
already started writing recipes and manifests and intend to share those
with this community. Part of my time worked on this will be directly
paid by Koumbit.]

So we've got a few half-finished puppet modules here:

https://hg.koumbit.net/puppet-modules/file/tip

I'm sure a lot of people here also have their own little (or big)
versionned repository of manifests.

The problem I see now is that we're starting to have a *lot* of those
little (and big) repositories everywhere. No coordination, lots of
duplicated efforts (for example, I know I'm not the only one working on
network configuration abstractions...), my crucial question now is: how
to avoid wasting efforts?

The wiki is nice and all, but for sharing recipes, it sucks, with all
due respect: there's no way to branch off the recipes there and deploy
them easily on our own nodes. So for me the wiki's out, unless as a
temporary solution for documenting the known modules repositories (is
there a page for that yet?)

What I think we should have is a common "module forge" or some place
where people can push their modules. That doesn't have to be on
reductive lab's Trac (but it can be!!) and it sure could use a broader
comitters community than the Puppet core. I would very well see a
distinction here, the way a lot of open source project proceed, between
"contributed" (e.g. modules) and "core" stuff (ie. the puppet ruby core).

At the very least, let's start by documenting explicitely all the
public repositories out there. I created a ModuleRepositories page,
where I added my repo and David Schmitt's (because those are the only
ones I reliably know of right now, feel free to add yours!).

But I think we should seriously think about how to scale this further..

Other wild idea: What about namespace clashes? How many puppet modules
named "common" do we have out there!? How can we deal with this?

Thanks for comments,

PS: I dug through the archive to find such a discussion and couldn't
find anything, sorry if this was already beaten to death before.

-- 
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go
with the drove.
                        - Mark Twain
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