Saltproject IO

Open Hour 2023-FEB-16

Feb 16, 2023

Open Hour YouTube playlist | Contact us! saltproject@vmware.com

Watch the video recording of the Salt Community Open Hour for February 16, 2023. In this open hour, Thomas explains how fail hard works in Salt:

Agenda

  • General updates and announcements
  • Salt Project user group meetups
  • Community forum updates
  • Salt docs working group update
  • Overview of the GitHub Actions pipeline
  • Updated Salt LTS/STS release plan
  • Q&A plus discussion

General updates and announcements

  • Open Hours are held every 1st and 3rd Thursday from 10a.m. to 11a.m. Pacific.
  • Our next Open Hour will be March 2.
  • Join a Salt Project working group!

Salt Project user group meetups

Nicholas Hughes is working on a community-led effort to host some more in-person Salt events. These would be:

  • Single-day events.
  • Within a reasonable distance.
  • Speakers giving sessions that are possibly recorded so that people who can’t attend in person can still participate.
  • And of course: food and chances to do some social networking.

Go to spugm.com to join a mailing list for updates and let us know you are interested.

Community forums update

Today’s issue: fail hard.

There was an issue in the community with a user who had used fail hard in a lot of their states. Then, when a state actually failed, they noticed that the rest of the highstate exited and the output stopped after that state failure.

The community member had a misunderstood what fail hard means and how it works. They had thought that fail hard just fails the module, not the entire highstate. However, that is incorrect.

Fail hard will fail the entire fail state and highstate. It won’t run any more after that. When it fails, it’s done. You will just get the last state that failed as your output. Fail hard can be implemented as a per-state setting or you can set is as an option in the minion, but its also a requisite.

Salt docs working group

Jennifer Hollars is working on a long-term project to improve the Salt docs landing page. (By the way, the docs landing page is currently inaccessible because of a known issue with the publishing pipeline. We will fix it soon.)

Right now, Jennifer is working on developing the user personas for the Salt community. If you don’t know what user personas are, that’s a UX term for a set of archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users or community.

Once she’s finished developing the personas, she’ll then begin to map out the ideal user journey for each of these personas. User journeys are another UX term that refers to the step-by-step journey that a user takes to achieve their goals. So, in this case, she’ll map out the ways that each persona can use the docs landing page to find the documentation that will help them achieve their most common goals.

Right now, Jennifer would like to validate her proto-personas to ensure they are grounded in solid user research and match with reality. To do that, we’d like to interview around 12-15 community members who come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels with Salt. People who participate will get a free Salt Project t-shirt from the Salt Project store.

If you would like to help, send Alyssa Rock a DM on the community Slack and we’ll determine if you’re a good fit for our project’s goals. Be aware that we might not choose to interview everyone who volunteers simply because we’re looking for a few specific types of users. We’re especially looking for people who are junior system administrators who are new to Salt and people who are advanced Salt systems architects. Also, if you happen to know anyone who is not a Salt user but could be a prospective Salt user, we would love to talk to them as well.

Q&A plus discussion

Q: Have we cut a branch for the 3006 release yet? I’m wondering if this PR can still make it in: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/63464

  • A: We can take a look at that.

Q: We’re facing a problem with repo.managed and wondered if there is an existing bug report for it affecting Ubuntu repo. We are using onedir. Specifically, it’s about the trust keyword you have to add. It’s getting malformed. We’ve had to replace it with a brute force file.managed workaround. I wanted to aske before I file a bug report.

  • A: I do believe there was an issue because onedir does not have access to the Ubuntu Python libraries.
  • The line repeating problem might be something that has a fix in for 3006, but go ahead and file a bug report.

Comments

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