Saltproject IO

Open Hour and Q&A 2025-APR-17

by Salt Project Team — Apr 17, 2025

In the open hour this month, the Salt Project Team talked about David Murphy retiring, revival of the MacOS Working Group, and more.

Agenda

  • David Murphy has sailed away into retirement
  • MacOS Working Group: It’s back!
  • Salt Extensions: New Project Board and WG Captain
  • Salt Formulas: Org member cleanup
  • Salt v3007.2 STS Progress Update
  • Salt 3008 LTS release timeline
  • The Hacks Podcast (Update)
  • Join our Discord Server
  • Q&A

David Murphy has sailed away into retirement

MacOS Working Group: It’s back!

  • Wes has come back to revive the MacOS Working Group as the returning captain!
  • New monthly calendar events have been added to the Salt Project Google Calendar, and to the Salt Project Community Discord events
  • Want to learn more about Salt and MacOS? Or to get involved? Drop into the #macos channel of the Salt Project Community Discord

Salt Extensions: New Project Board and WG Captain

  • David Murphy was previously running the Salt Extensions Working Group
  • Shane Lee is now the new Salt Extensions Working Group captain
  • The Salt Extensions Working Group meets twice a month. Events can be found on the Salt Project Google Calendar, and in Salt Project Community Discord events
  • Want to learn more about Salt and extensions? Or to get involved? Drop into the #salt-extensions channel of the Salt Project Community Discord

Salt Formulas: Org member cleanup

  • The Salt Formulas GitHub Organization recently had membership cleanup, based on inactivity
  • Jeff Neel is the Salt Formulas Working Group Captain
  • The Salt Formulas Working Group meets twice a month. Events can be found on the Salt Project Google Calendar, and in Salt Project Community Discord events
  • Want to learn more about Salt and Salt Formulas? Or to get involved? Drop into the #salt-formulas channel of the Salt Project Community Discord

Salt v3007.2 STS Progress Update

Merge forwards from the Salt v3006.10 LTS have made their way into prepping for an upcoming Salt v3007.2 STS release.

Some test failures still currently exist for 3007. Once these are addressed, along with some specific 3007 PRs, a release is expected in the near future.

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

The Hacks Podcast (Update)

The Hacks Podcast had their final episode released on Oct. 8 2024.

The RSS feed channel (the-hacks, in the Salt Project Community Discord) is being archived, and The Hacks landing pages have been taken off of the Salt Project website. The website pages were using the old LibSyn links that no longer work, as The Hacks have been disabled from their podcast publishing platform.

You can listen to all the episodes of The Hacks podcast on Spotify (and other platforms).

For blog posts published last year from Thomas Hatch and Chunga on leaving Broadcom, learn more:

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. However, we are focusing on the core of Salt. This is expected to be more apparent with the release of 3008 as various components get spun off into community support via extensions of one type or another. This has meant leaning on the Salt Project Working Groups, especially Salt Extensions, because of the Great Module Migration
  • Salt Project is also currently in the process of updating and enforcing our POLICY around how bugs, feature requests, etc. are addressed. We also plan to continue working with those interested in becoming Community Core Maintainers that help in triaging issues, PRs, and contributing new PRs to Salt
  • The functionality of the commercial offering (Tanzu Salt) is powered by the underlying Salt Project open source software it is built upon, and is an important part of the VMware software suite

Q: What is the state of POP Project and Idem Project? The projects look to be archived?

Q: With Idem out of the picture, what are the alternative paths? salt-cloud? Terraform / OpenTofu?

  • When it comes to working with third-party public clouds (AWS, Azure, Linode, etc.), the Salt Project Team will no longer be maintaining the Salt modules working with them. The Great Module Migration is resulting in community Salt Extensions
  • An AWS module, upgraded for use of boto3, is currently under development by community members. For more information, and if interested in helping development and maintainership, drop a message in the #salt-extensions Discord channel
  • When it comes to future focus of the Salt Project Team, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) will be in scope from other VMware contributors/maintainers
  • Idem was meant to help manage APIs, ranging from cloud providers to ReadTheDocs, and was initially meant to extend or displace salt-cloud and other Salt modules. With Idem being archived, the recommendation for working with third-party Cloud providers would be to either (1) use an alternative tool for cloud infrastructure (ex. OpenTofu for AWS EC2, S3, etc.), and Salt for system-level configuration management (ex. a Linux node running in EC2), or (2) getting involved in the Salt Extensions Working Group to assist in the extensions that would be necessary to properly extend salt-cloud in the future. Salt v3008 LTS will have heavily reduced capabilities when it comes to cloud management, and will be dependent on the development and maintainership of Salt extensions

Q: What is the current state of salt-ssh and salt-cloud?

  • With Heist archived (as part of POP and Idem archivals), salt-ssh is the tool of choice going forward. salt-ssh will continue to be maintained as part of salt
  • salt-cloud will continue to be maintained within salt, though the third-party cloud targets are being migrated into Salt extensions

Q: I’m curious if there is plans to remove double up of code in Salt? I have just started using salt recently and I noticed there is a lot of double up of code that is 12 years old that is not being used. Specific example: there are duplicates of the get_tok function

  • We can see a get_token function in both localfs.py and rediscluster.py. Those are plugins and are meant to have duplicate functions
  • When it comes to general optimization/reviewing of code within core Salt, we are expecting a greatly reduced code base as part of the Great Module Migration work going into Salt v3008 LTS and subsequent releases

Q: Is the Salt Calendar currently visible outside of the Salt Calendar page, and Discord events? My employer blocks Google Calendar, but I would be able to make use of an Outlook Calendar or exported calendar (ics)

  • We only share a Google calendar via the Salt Project Event Calendar page, and keeps the Discord Events updated in line with what is found on there
  • We will not be migrating the calendar hosting/management to a different platform for the foreseeable future
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