[Puppet Users] Stop aptitude package provider from using '-y'

You would probably need to modify the code for the aptitude provider, or
else to write an alternative package provider that has the behavior you
want. Given that for the latter you could start from the built-in aptitude
provider, those options are roughly comparable in difficulty.

Before you consider that, however, I suggest you look at whether there is
any combination of options that would elicit the desired behavior from
aptitude. If there is, then the job would be fairly straightforward, but
if not, then you're looking at rather a hard problem, both in interacting
with the aptitude text UI and in interfacing that interaction with Puppet.


John



John

And by that I mean to that aptitude should never prompt, but instead fail
(returning a non-zero exit code) under those circumstances where you want
it to do. Looking at the aptitude provider, you might be able to get
around the exit code by parsing the standard error text, which is already
done to cover one case.

Also, I was a bit quick to deny the possibility of configuring your desired
behavior: you cannot configure *Puppet* to change the behavior of the
apitude provider, short of modifying the provider, but you may be able to
configure *aptitude* to provide satisfactory default behavior. You could
then use Puppet to ensure that the desired aptitude configuration is in
place before you start managing packages.


John

If you are experiencing conflicts in aptitutes package resolver, you're
the victim of an underspecified manifest.

You need to explicitely tell puppet to install AND remove the packages
which are part of the resolution before installing the final package.

If you instead solve it "manually", you'll loose the repeatability and
stability of your installation.

A very good example are apache MPMs. For some modules you need a
specific one and relying only on package dependencies might lead to a
flip-flop situation where installing A removes B and vice-versa. Having
an explicit resolution in place will already fail when compiling the
catalog, pointing you directly to the collision.


Best Regards, David