Facter 3.X questions

[Kurt Jaeger]

Hi!

> Since Facter's move to a C/C++ codebase, a lot of facts have gone missing
> on FreeBSD machines. As a dabbler in FreeBSD I want to help fix this! :)

Very nice! I'm no puppet or facter user, but I can probably help
with the ports part.

Can you explain the state of factor for us ? We have 3.1.3 in
the ports, and upstream is @3.1.8. Have you tried to provide
a patch to the ports to get the port up2date ?

Then: What are those 'facts' ? Are they modules for facter to
collect specific info on a system etc ? Are they part of facter itself
or do you want to provide seperate ports for this ?

What kind of facts are generally available ?

The WWW in pkg-descr is https://puppetlabs.com/facter, which
no longer works -- what would be the correct link ?

How/when should facter replace rubygem-facter in the ports tree ?
Right now puppet depends on rubygem-facter, which is only at 2.4.4 ?
Upstream is at 2.4.6.

> more difficult missing areas such as determining swap space, networks and
> such, that would be greatly appreciated. Getting kenv and sysctl settings
> has been fairly simple, these ones have been a little bit more complex...

For this, we probably need more understanding of facter 8-}
Any links that you can share that bring us up to speed ?

> 3) How difficult is it to become a maintainer?

Submit PRs for sysutils/facter and sysutils/rubygem-facter.
robak@ is the maintainer for rubygem-facter, so maybe he's willing
to step down ?

> I notice that facter is
> currently under the ruby maintainer email namespace, but right now it's not
> released to Rubygems since 2.4 and the code is 85% C++ now. I wouldn't mind
> throwing my hat in and becoming a maintainer if that would help? :)

Submit PRs requesting maintainer, and if they come with
patches that bring the ports up2date, you're maintainer
if the previous maintainer agrees.

> PS. Sorry if this is the wrong way to do this, first time emailing to a
> port maintainer list. I asked in the FreeBSD freenode room and people said
> this was the way to do it and to CC the Ports mailing list also :)

Both lists are fine. As this is more a general ports question,
-ports is probably fine for further discussion. There's not much
discussion on -ruby.

-- 
pi at opsec.eu            +49 171 3101372                         4 years to go !