Open Hour and Q&A 2025-MAR-20

In the open hour last week, the Salt Project Team talked about the completion of Salt Project CI work, the release of Salt v3006.10 LTS, and more.

Agenda

• State of Salt Project CI
• Salt v3006.10 LTS release
• Temporary RPM signing issue
• Upcoming Salt v3007.2 STS point release
• Salt v3008 LTS release timeline
• Future Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) requirement
• Join our Discord Server
• Q&A

State of Salt Project CI

As a result of the Salt Project AWS account backend deleted in October 2024, the Salt Project CI came to a halt. It was dependent on using autoscaling groups and custom EC2 AMIs to run through our entire test suite. This had meant PRs from the community and the dev team haven’t been able to properly launch CI.

Work has been done to migrate CI tests to be capable of running entirely within systemd-enabled containers, and to reduce spend on MacOS runners by migrating to free-cost runners in public repositories. Anyone with a GitHub account will be able to run tests on their own forks using public containers, as opposed to the old approach that depended on AWS-managed EC2 instances.

GitHub Actions are now fully functional, and we were able to get the Salt v3006.10 LTS release out!

Salt v3006.10 LTS Release

The Salt Project has just released the 3006.10 LTS bugfix of Salt.

For more details:

• Blog post: Salt 3006.10 LTS is available
• Salt v3006.10 LTS release notes

Temporary RPM Signing Issue (resolved)

At initial release of Salt v3006.10 LTS, our new pipelines weren’t ensuring the RPM packages were signed. This has now been remedied, with release automation now ensuring signing will be done as expected.

NOTE: MacOS packages aren’t signed in the latest release, nor will they be in upcoming releases. We will update the community if this changes.

Upcoming Salt v3007.2 STS point release

The next Salt v3007.2 STS point release is expected to be out by end of March, early April.

Salt 3008 LTS release timeline

• Salt v3008 LTS is estimated to be released by June/July 2025
• We will have an RC prerelease period sometime beforehand and leading up to the GA release

Future Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) requirement

As part of ongoing integration with Broadcom, contributions to repositories managed by Salt Project will eventually require a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). When this happens, our contributing guide will be updated, and we will notify the community of the need to sign git commits. A bot will be used to assist in notifying contributors of this need once it is in place.

Join our Discord server

Join our Discord server at: https://discord.gg/J7b7EscrAs

Discord can also help you know about upcoming Salt events, such as Open Hour and working group meetings:

• If you express interest, Discord will notify you when an event you are interested in is starting.
• Discord Events mirror the Salt Project Community google calendar
• Discord Desktop app: Events can be accessed at the very top-left in the Discord server
• Discord Mobile app: Events can be found by clicking the small calendar icon beneath the Discord Server name

Q&A

Includes questions from the Salt Project Open Hour call, in addition to some questions from the Discord.

Q: What is the confidence of the future of Salt Project continuing forward as a maintained open source project under Broadcom?

• We have complete confidence that Salt Project will continue forward as open source software maintained by full-time core maintainers employed by Broadcom
• The functionality of the commercial offering (Tanzu Salt) is powered by the underlying Salt Project open source software it is built upon

Q: With the modules that were marked as being moved to extensions maintained by the core team, have those already been spun out? And if so where are they now, repo-wise?

• List being referred to in question: Core extensions list
• Core extension modules will stay in Salt for the Salt v3008 LTS release
• Only the extensions marked as community extensions will be taken out of core Salt as part of the Salt v3008 LTS release
• The modules listed as core extensions will be spun out in a later future release

Q: Could we have the python package GitPython included in Onedir by default? It would make bootstrapping masters/minions just a bit easier.

• We likely won’t include it in relenv by default
• We’ll likely have it as optionally included via a salt extension in the future
• Bootstrap and salt will include the ability to pull in salt extension third-party dependencies, modules, etc.

Q: Is the facility to install extensions going to allow specifying a version? Is that available already and if so, where is in the repo? I was under the impression that you were talking about some functionality to specify that the master pulled in an extension at startup - maybe I misunderstood.

• salt pip is a wrapper around an isolated version of pip which would allow for installing/pinning to specific versions of extensions
• As for being able to install Salt Extensions via bootstrap, at install, there is an open feature request: A flag to install Salt Extensions and other PyPI packages

Q: Will extensions be easily usable on air gapped networks or will it take a workaround?

• Extensions will be usable on air gapped networks via locally-hosted pypi mirroring in your infra (ex. devpi), as all salt extensions would be available as Python packages

Q: Are there any plans to add RabbitmQ as a transport? There might have been a demo of it at a Saltconf, but I might be mis-remembering.

• There is an old, unfinished PR POC for implementing RabbitMQ transport
• The work in this PR may be revisited as part of Salt v3008 LTS milestones, though prioritization may mean that community members would need to pick it up in order for it to be included in Salt
• Comment from community member: I wonder whether NATS would be a better alternative to RabbitMQ?

General Commentary: Migrating to Salt from Ansible has been a positive experience!

Additional comments from community members:

• “After a while with salt, when you work with ansible you’ll keep hitting “what do you mean I can’t do that???”
• “I’ve been using Saltstack since 2014 for security and self healing automation - on Arm64 platforms today running over 800 checks/fixes in less than 8 seconds. Nothing comes close in the SCA (Software Configuration Automation) space. Keep up the great work!”
• Recent saltstack subreddit thread: Salt is awesome

Q: I’ve noticed that OpenBSD is no longer listed as a supported operating system and the install documentation has removed the instructions. Are there plans to support OpenBSD again in the future?

• There are no plans to officially support or test Salt on OpenBSD or FreeBSD
• Comment from community member: There’s a native OpenBSD port/package, though at least on -current it was failing. But also I think a bunch of modules were removed from core: https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/sysutils/salt