Conditionally declare packages

[joshuaspence]

To avoid potential "duplicate resource definitions", wrap package declarations in a conditional block.

[thias]

This is a hack, and I prefer avoiding hacks :-)

Please provide details of the real world case you've encountered, in order to see if it's possible to solve it cleanly with some params.pp tweaks. On RHEL/Fedora, all of those split packages have different names, so there's no problem, so I'm assuming you're running something else and I'm interested in those details ;-)

(I consider defined() a hack because it's parse order dependent, so you will get different and/or unexpected results when setting ensure to 'installed' in one place and 'absent' in the other for the same resource... using ensure_resource() is still a hack, but at least doesn't have this particular problem)

[joshuaspence]

We are using a custom build. The package is essentially equivalent to php5-cli, php5-common and php5-fpm.

[thias]

And have you tried to simply have that single package provide the 3 names? For rpms, it would be this in the spec file (for debs and ebuilds and ports, etc. I don't know) :

Provides: %{name}-cli = %{version}-%{release}
Provides: %{name}-common = %{version}-%{release}
Provides: %{name}-fpm = %{version}-%{release}

I'm not entirely sure that would work with puppet's package resource's yum provider, but it's worth a shot.

[joshuaspence]

That's not what the issue is... the issue is that the following code does not work:

class { 'php::cli': 
  cli_package_name => 'my-package',
}

class { 'php::fpm::daemon':
  package_name => 'my-package',
}

[thias]

Indeed, the above code doesn't work. But if instead of 'my-package' twice, you set 'my-package-cli' and 'my-package-fpm', with the single 'my-package' properly "providing" those two names (as I illustrated with my rpm example), maybe it could work.

At this point, I would be more inclined to allow a special value for each package_name which would disable the package resource, and probably change any requirement to the common package when used. Would that work for you?