Saltproject IO

Open Hour 2024-MAY-16

May 16, 2024

Open Hour 2024-May-16

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

In this open hour, Tom gives a big announcement about his decision to leave Broadcom and Chunga unveils a new community maintainer program.

Agenda

  • General updates and announcements
  • Discord events
  • Extensions working group report
  • Salt Project Community Core Maintainers
  • A word from Tom Hatch
  • Q&A plus discussion

General updates and announcements

  • Open Hours are held every 3rd Thursday from 10a.m. to 11a.m. Pacific.
  • Our next Open Hour will be June 20.
  • Join a Salt Project working group!

Discord events with Chunga

Join our Discord server! https://discord.gg/GC5U3SEF

We’ve been unveiling new changes to Discord:

  • Discord Events are now mirroring what is seen in the Salt Project Community google calendar: https://saltproject.io/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.
  • If you express interest in an event on Discord, Discord will notify you when an event you are interested in is starting.

Extensions working group report

The Salt Extensions working group, led by Nick Hughes and Alyssa Rock, meets on the 1st and 3rd Thursday at 14:00 UTC. At every session, the group works on making the Salt Extensions workflow easier for both users and maintainers. We could use your help!

In today’s meeting, Alyssa summarized some of the key challenges and conversations that this group has had over the past few months since the group first formed in February. In general, this group identifies current pain points with the Salt extensions process and then works to brainstorm and implement solutions.

Since February, this group has been tackling these challenges:

  • Making extension maintainership easy - Nick is working to make his community maintained Salt extensions organization the one-stop shop for anyone who wants to create or maintain a Salt extension. One of their goals is to create a unified hub for extensions discovery and usage. For new extensions, they’ve been working on creating an improved copier template that you can use to easily spin up new extensions and host them in this org. For people who want to create and host third-party extensions (including those hosted on GitLab), they’ve worked out a workflow for how you can host a stub on their org that points people to your docs and your repos as needed.
  • Installation - Another big challenge we’ve been trying to solve is installation. How does an extension get into the user’s system so that they can use it? How can you install extensions at scale? This group was able to work together to fix a bug that made it so they weren’t available on pip, which is needed for a bootstrap installation. Additionally, as a result of the installation issues raised in this group, we were able to secure a commitment from subject matter experts within Broadcom to thoroughly test the RC release of 3008 to ensure we have a happy path to installation. The goal is to create a well-engineers, well-documentation solution that works for most situations, including air-gapped installs.
  • Standardization - This group has been working on creating standards and frameworks for all extensions. Max Arnold has been working on a proof of concept metadata structure that will allow us to pull out important information from Salt extensions and surface in our centralized database.
  • Documentation - We’ve also been working on identifying gaps in the installation documentation and how to adapt the documentation to this new decentralized model. Derek joined us for a few sessions where we identified some great potential workable solutions that we hope to take action on.
  • Testing - When members of our group mentioned that writing unit tests was a major pain point for maintaining extensions, we reached out and got Pedro to attend our meeting today and answer questions about testing best practices and guidelines.

So this is a group that gets things done for Salt and a testament to the strength of the Salt Project community. Alyssa really proud of all this group has accomplished over the 3 short months since it was first formed. Thanks to everyone in the group for their contributions and insights. Keep up the good work!

See the working group meeting notes for more information.

Salt Project Community Core Maintainers

Salt Project is taking steps to secure the future and strength of Salt. To that end, we’re starting a new program that will invite select community members to work directly with the Salt Core Team as a core maintainer of Salt. These maintainers will also attend one stand-up per week with the Salt Core Team. We’ll start small with a pilot program to figure out how to do this and build from there.

If you’re interested in becoming a Community Core Maintainer, contact Chunga on Discord.

A word from Tom Hatch

Last week, Tom had his last day working at Broadcom. See Tom’s recent blog entry for a full explanation: I’m exiting Broadcom - Staying with Salt Project forever.

Broadcom has been making some cuts, but still plans to move forward with Salt. For Salt, Tom wants to make Salt easier to maintain and get the community involved in core Salt development.

We also recognize that in open source generally, there have been a few hallmark projects that have done things to change their licenses and community governance. There are no plans to change the license or community governance within Salt. Tom hopes we can be a project like Debian, which is a good example of open source projects that endure despite the waves that hit them.

Despite all the changes, Tom believes that Salt can still move forward in a strong way.

Q&A plus discussion

Q: My team in production attempted to use the pip and virtual environment modules and they are not workable. The virtual environment module requires the old binary that hasn’t been working for a long time. It’s confused about which Python to install with.

  • Q: Are you using pip?
  • A: We’re installing into a virtual environment using the pip module. Our team’s workaround for the short term has been to run cmd.run. For now, we recommend putting a tag in the documentation that it’s a known issue for now. But I want you to know my team is not complaining. We are thankful and love Salt a lot.
  • A: Another community member mentioned being impacted as well. It appears to be caused by a known issue in pip: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/11349 . They said they’d sort it in 24.1b1 fix to pip. We used workaround with cmd.run as well. Here’s a windows example:
pip:
  cmd.run:
    - name: C:\Python312\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip==24.0
    - require:
      - sls: <example of sls file without.sls>

Q: What will happen to Idem?

  • A: As it stands right now, Idem is stopped and is not staffed currently. It has been shelved for the time being. That being said, it could be spun up very quickly if the powers that be change their mind.
  • Also, for the record, Idem is still used within an enterprise offering in Broadcom so it is not dead for sure.
  • If someone is interested in the development of Idem, please reach out. It would be great to create a community effort and it’s a huge opportunity.

Q: I have have a question on 3008 release. ​When would be a tentative timeline for this release? Can we communicate this to our customers or should we hold off for any reasons?

  • We’re aiming to have 3008 released by this Fall.

Q: Will the features from 3007 STS will be in 3008 LTS?

  • A: Yes

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