Add purge capability to resources

[thias]

I've just declared the following :

stage { 'first': before => Stage['main'] }
Package_use {
  target => '/etc/portage/package.use',
  stage  => 'first',
}
package_use { 'dev-vcs/git': use => [ '-gpg', '-perl' ] }
package_use { 'net-analyzer/nagios-plugins': use => [ '-ldap', '-suid' ] }
package_use { 'media-gfx/imagemagick': use => [ 'jpeg', 'lzma', 'png' ] }

My problem is that if I remove any of the 3 package_use lines, the content of the /etc/portage/package.use file isn't updated (the entry isn't removed). I would like that to be possible without having to use ensure => absent. Other types typically have it working when doing this (which I've tried, but didn't work) :

resources { 'package_use': purge => true }

I haven't used the other package_* types yet, but I expect that this might apply to them too.

The reason for this is that I want my systems 100% puppet-managed (hence the target I use), and it's much more convenient to just remove obsolete code from the manifests rather than having to always change to absent and keep forever just in case.

[tampakrap]

have a look at #12 and #17 please, I think your issue is duplicate of #17

[thias]

Indeed, and I didn't find them because they're closed...

I'll have a look at switching to using the /etc/portage/package.*/default files, as that would work for me as long as I'm also able to purge the /etc/portage/package.*/ directories, to be 100% sure there are no entries which aren't managed by puppet.

Still, this is quite a big issue IMHO, since these types are typically ones that would benefit a lot from purging...

[tampakrap]

and what's wrong with the solution at #17 (comment) ?

[thias]

The problem with that solution is that you could add this to the manifest, then remove it, but it would stay present on the node :

package_use { 'dev/example':
  use    => 'foo',
  target => 'example'
}

This is because the /etc/portage/package.*/ directory itself doesn't get purged of other files (example in this case), only the content of the default file gets purged.

So this is what's required for a workaround which matches my expectations of a full purge : Any resources no longer declared in the manifest are guaranteed to not be there :

resources { 'package_use': purge => true }
exec { '/bin/rm -f /etc/portage/package.use':
  onlyif => '/usr/bin/test -f /etc/portage/package.use',
} ->
file { '/etc/portage/package.use':
  ensure  => directory,
  owner   => 'root',
  group   => 'root',
  mode    => '0755',
  recurse => true,
  purge   => true,
} ->
Package_use <| |>
file { '/etc/portage/package.use/default': }

It looks overkill, but unfortunately it's not... What do you want to do from here? Keep a bug report open to track possible ways of improving this? Have me submit an update to the README to mention this?

[tampakrap]

Let's keep this open and see what others will say. I don't have a strong opinion yet on how to proceed

[vikraman]

I believe this is a limitation of the parsedfile provider. Moving to puppet-filemapper will fix all these issues.

http://adrienthebo.github.io/puppet-filemapper/#Removing_empty_files

[thias]

Update : Note that my workaround no longer works, and is no longer possible to use, once you include the '::portage' class, since it also declares the same directories (without the recurse/purge parameters I need). I just discovered that when continuing porting my existing Gentoo changes to this module, as soon as I wanted to manage make.conf with the module.

As @vikraman wrote, it seems like my initial problem would be solved by moving to the filemapper, though I would still have the purge issue for the directories declared by the main portage class.