On Thursday, June 25, 2015 at 2:43:34 PM UTC-7, Vince Skahan wrote: > > I'm fiddling with PE 3.8.1 to understand the pros+cons of potentially > updating our 3.7.0 PE server to that as a path toward the coming soon 4.x > version of PE. > > Unfortunately, even doing the initial module installations to 3.8.1 > immediately showed issues. In this case, I ran into the error in module.rb > mentioned in PUP 3121 and fixed with the two-line patch in > https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/pull/3310 - trivial bug, trivial > patch to PE. > > According to the PUP the bug was fixed in 4.0.0 (great) but not fixed in > the PE 3.8.x versions that came out after that (not so great). > Hand-patching my PE setup fixed the issue, but there's something that > doesn't feel right about needing to hand-patch a commercial product to get > it to work. >
Hi Vince, thanks for the note. I'm sorry you ran into this issue. > Questions: > > - why wasn't it fixed in the 3.8.1 PE commercial product ? If PE is > your flagship commercial product, why would you 'not' backport trivial > fixes like this for your 'paying' customers ? > > We absolutely do backport upstream fixes into the commercial releases, for exactly the reasons that you describe. We do not backport *every* change, as that gets insanely complicated really quickly. It's generally safer and less confusing to regularly rebase onto newer upstream releases instead of cherry-picking individual fixes. The process generally is that customers who are getting bit by bugs raise support requests through the commercial support team, who work with product management (my team) and the developers to get fixes prioritized, coded and released. This particular bug didn't have any commercial support tickets associated with it, nor any high community priority around it, so it just slotted into the normal flow of upstream-into-product release train. > > - what, if anything, are you fixing in the 3.8.x PE commercial product > at this point ? > > So, PE3.8.0 released April 28 and PE 3.8.1 released June 18; this might be too few data points to draw a trendline, but should show that we're actively maintaining and improving the line. Going back a little further, we maintained PE2.8 for 18 months into the lifecycle of the PE3.x series, which should be a proof point that it's not just talk. These were security and bugfix releases that contained either bumped OSS component versions where possible, or cherry-picked bugfixes that came in according to the process I outlined above. > > - what can we expect in term of bug fixes in the 6 or more month > window between Open Source 4.x and PE 4.x in terms of supporting your > 'paying' customers ? > > I'm not sure why you keep putting quotes around 'paying'. It's real, actual money from real customers, who we love a lot. :) Do you mean fixes into the PE3.x series? Or fixes to 4.x that happen in open-source? The 4.0->4.1->4.2 release cycle in OSS since April is exactly this: responding to community bugs, filing off the rough edges, and preparing it to ship in PE this summer. > > - > > I guess I'm not understanding the business model here. It's great you're > moving forward to 4.0 and it's improvements, but if your for-pay product > has bugs that will be around for a year plus (ex: this one) until your > commercial 4.0-based product eventually appears, even assuming we jump > day-one to that (we wouldn't, as 'that' will need time to mature), why > would we pay the money to run buggy software ? > Some of this is due to the long delay in getting Open-Source Puppet 4.0 out the door. The 'master' puppet branch had been accumulating fixes like this one throughout 2014 in anticipation of a Nov 2014 Puppet 4 release, which ended up not happening until April 2015. The open-source to commercial flow tends to be about 3 months for any given version, absent the distortion caused by these big major version bumps (which we're trying to minimize by doing more frequent, smaller versions going forward). Literally all software has bugs. It's about having an escalation path from the support side to fix the ones you care about, plus enough value-add features, scale improvements, and workflows from the product to make it valuable to you. > > Confused in the PL approach toward support of their 'commercial' vs. 'open > source' product lines..... > > Hope this helps. You can see the release timeline and support lifecycle I was talking about here: https://puppetlabs.com/misc/puppet-enterprise-lifecycle --eric0 -- Eric Sorenson - eric.soren...@puppetlabs.com - freenode #puppet: eric0 puppet platform // coffee // techno // bicycles -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/puppet-users/477355b9-62e6-40fc-b505-8d21dbda3bfd%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
