[Puppet Users] defined() implicitly requiring resource reference

My apologies for the confusion.




I think you're looking at it the wrong way around. It is a fundamental
problem for you if you don't know what all the packages you (may) want to
manage are. This is not information that ought to be gleaned from your
manifest set, nor even information that you ought to be collecting
dynamically from clients, but rather information which you ought to have a
priori. How you store it and keep it updated is a separate matter that I
have heretofore avoided, but Puppet does have a capable external data
interface, Hiera, that could reasonably be applied to the problem.

Nevertheless, if it is not feasible for you to determine up front all the
packages your apps may be using or may want to use, then you can get by
with a smaller list, consisting of just the union of those packages
currently installed and those you want to be installed. You already have
those data at hand, and it is possible to merge them into the needed list.
For example, rewriting my app::packages this way should help:

class app::packages {
     $apps = unique(concat(split($::app_packages, ','), <wanted_packages>))
     package { $apps:
         ensure => 'purged'
     }
}

That might be paired with app::myapp declarations there or elsewhere of the
form

app::myapp { <wanted_packages>: }

The <wanted_packages> represents an array of the names of the packages you
want installed, which could be a variable (including a parameter) of some
class in the 'app' module (even app::packages itself), or might be a
function call (e.g. to an external data service) or maybe something else.
The unique() and concat() functions are available from PuppetLabs's popular
"stdlib" add-in module.


John