Duplicate declaration (wget) with willdurand/nodejs

[cdoublev]

Description

Puppet fails to apply catalog. It outputs en error of a duplicate package (wget) declaration from init.pp, with willdurand/nodejs/manifests/instance/pkgs.pp (so both modules are using ensure_packages function from puppetlabs/stdlib).

Steps to reproduce

Create Composer and NodeJS resources with willdurand/composer (1.2.2) and willdurand/nodejs (2.0.0-alpha1). Both require puppetlabs/stdlib >= 3.2.1 (version 4.14.0 was used).

Further details

I managed to solve this issue by changing init.pp on line 53 from:

ensure_packages(['wget']) to ensure_packages(['wget'], {ensure => 'installed'})

... which I think is strange, as this second (optional) argument is always merged with ensure => 'present', and I can read from Puppet docs that for the ensure attribute...

Valid values are present (also called installed), absent, [...]

So obiously it should be a Puppet issue, but as I'm really not a Puppet expert, I prefered to open this issue and share this simple workaround.

[Ma27]

As we received tons of similar issues in willdurand/puppet-nodejs, I debugged the entire issue one time:
when using the ensure_* function it only avoids duplicated resources if each parameter of the resource is equal. As one of the modules uses an ensure parameter right now and the other one doesn't, Puppet crashes during the catalog evaluation.

The easiest fix would be to add ensure => installed. Care to open a PR?

[cdoublev]

Sorry I didn't search for this issue in willdurand/puppet-nodejs. I found your comment explaining what's going on under ensure_packages.

I'm fine with opening your suggested PR, but would it not be better to remove any ensure => installed in willdurand/puppet-nodejs ? But I'm also fine with a local patch and wait for ensure_* functions to be eventually improved.

[Ma27]

But I'm also fine with a local patch and wait for ensure_* functions to be eventually improved.

I don't think that this will ever happen. AFAIK this is the expected behavior (see the docs for reference).

I'd go for adding the ensure => installed parameter to the affected manifest in this module. Whenever you look at the cookbook, the official docs or the code, you'll see that all code examples contain an ensure parameter when installing a new package.

If you'd like to open a PR for that, I'll have a look at it in the next days :)

[Ma27]

closed as of #42