> Hi,
>
> I have an idea to improve(?) the provision templates delivered with
> Foreman.
Excellent 
> Over time, I've struggled to merge/rebase updates that are put into
> the core templates into the "clones" that I have implemented for our
> system profiles.
Whilst I'll address your suggestion below… as an aside, have you
looked at the foreman_teplmates plugin? That allows you to manage your
own templates in Git, which also means you can rebase your changes on
top of ours on a regular basis. Just some food for thought
> Would it be possible to add a method (snippet or array parameter)
> to allow for setting additional packages/package groups to be
> installed at provision time? This would hit 95% of the reason we
> clone provision templates to fulfill provisioning of systems with
> different profiles…and allow end-users like me the ease of not
> having to rebase template clones after every template update.
>
> We use provision templates for both servers and desktops, the
> desktops deliver over 1300 packages during provisioning, and I'm
> loathe to try and manage that much directly with Puppet post install.
I think this is a fair suggestion. It's really pretty easy to add a
parameter to a template which defaults to "[]" and is expanded as a
list of additional packages to install. Calling it
"additional_packages" seems fair
The only snag is that Arrays can only be used in class parameters at
the moment - host/hostgroup/domain/etc params are still simple strings
(work has been in progress on that for a bit). So, in the short term at
least, it would probably have to be a comma-separated string list that
can be split up in the template. I'm not sure if we have a character
limit of string params, so doing 1300 packages this way might be
awkward, but otherwise it should work OK. Obviously, once we can use
complex params here, a YAML list is probably the most convenient.
Doing it as a snippet is also possible, but much harder to override at
the hostgroup/domain/etc level than a parameter (as Bryan suggests) -
since you can only have one snippet by the name referenced in the main
provision template, you're really only moving the problem.
> If this is off topic, should I just take this over to the community-
> templates repo on github for further discussion?
It's not off-topic at all - it never hurts to check that our thinking
is in agreement :). That said, the community templates repo is
definitely the place to raise it - and do feel free to send a patch, if
you're in the mood! More contributors are always welcome.
Cheers
Greg
···
On Fri, 2017-09-29 at 08:23 -0700, Sean A wrote:
