REST Development

First, I've found the REST work to be significantly more complicated than I'd feared. The plumbing is nearly all done and the majority of the functionality is now available, but there's still the painful and lengthy process of converting the internals from using the old xmlrpc-style classes to the newer and much cleaner REST-style classes.

Release Status

Given how long I've been out in the wilderness on this, the fact that I don't know how long this conversion will take, and the rate at which tickets have been piling up, I've decided to put off this conversion and do a release instead.

Starting today, I'm refocusing on getting 0.24.0 out the door as soon as possible. I'll have a more complete idea of what'll be in it by next week, but at this point it'll include the environment work I did a while back plus as many tickets as I can reasonably fix in the next week or two. This will be the misspiggy release, so by around Monday you should have some idea of what tickets I'm planning on fixing in this release. I'll probably also create another intermediate release and start assigning tickets to that, which will also include the REST work when I finally get it done.

I was initially planning on rolling back to the last known-good state, but in assessing the current state, I don't think that's necessary. We've mostly gotten plumbing done without hooking it into anything, which means that we would just be releasing the old functionality along-side the new plumbing, which shouldn't have any affect at all, other than making my life easier.

I really hope to get this release out in less than two weeks: One week of ticket-closing, and one week of testing. Apparently the git repo is kinda hosed right now, but it'll be working again by Monday. If you're in a position to help test, please start testing on Monday.

Ticket Management

I've mentioned this a few times, but I'm still looking for help from the community to manage tickets. I appear to have really let the open tickets pile up, and I'm having a hard time keeping on top of the list of unreviewed tickets. If anyone is interested in helping out, this would be a great place to start, and there are tickets ranging from trivially easy to fantastically complicated, so we can find the right challenge for just about anyone.

I've also been considering putting a bounty on some of the tickets. I'm a bit broke at the moment, but some of the tickets have the right combination of annoyance and simplicity that it might be worth some money to get rid of them. Is anyone interested in this? If so, please email me personally, and, I guess, let me know what it would actually take to get you interested.

Would others be interested in putting their own bounty on tickets? Do you have a feature request or bug that's just killing you that you'd be willing to pay a little or a lot of money to have fixed? Hopefully the same bounty system would work for you.

Errata

This is more Reductive Labs than Puppet, but it's at least worth pointing out. I've recently been joined by two partners, Andrew Shafer and Shane Olson. Neither of them is at the company full time, but hopefully I'll be able to afford to bring them on full-time soon. My big hope is that their help will allow me to make the product even better for all of you and to develop both Puppet and the tools around it, like PuppetShow and Runnels, with a little more vigour.

Conclusion

The summary here, of course, is that REST is delayed for a while, but I'm hoping to get a release out relatively soon with the features I've already developed (including support for multiple environments) along with any critical open tickets. I'm also still looking for community help in managing tickets, and I'd love someone to help document features as I add them (James Turnbull has been doing a great job of picking my brain and documenting the results, as an example).

I should be posting more in the coming days, covering functionality you should expect to see in this release.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have any concerns.