Open Hour 2022-FEB-17

February 17, 2022 - Alyssa Rock

Agenda

Open Hours are held every 1st and 3rd Thursday from 10a.m. to 11a.m. Pacific.
Our next Salt Community Open Hour will be March 3rd.
Salt Project is modernizing its Code of Conduct. That means we’re making it a little more positive, inclusive, welcoming, and hopefully a lot more clear.
We are looking for new Community Moderators to join the existing team of moderators: Chunga, Wayne Werner, and Alyssa Rock. These are people who can help keep track of what is occurring in the community and are familiar with what to do when a Code of Conduct problem arises.
We want you for the Salty 5!

This week’s featured topic: the different types of returners.
There are four different returners:
- Standard: Executed on the minions.
- Event returner: The event bus passed through a returner.
- Master job caches: Sends and receives data on the system. These caches only works on systems where retrieving information is allowed.
- External job caches: The minion can save to a database and the master can retrieve it. External job caches are usually used in larger infrastructures.
Bonus topic: the standard warning about complicated pillars.
Someone on Stack Overflow was trying to set up a complex pillar system where it would auto load many files. Unfortunately, this is not best practice because it can overload your master. Rendering pillar data is one of the most expensive processes that your master does, partly because each minion calls the data independently. Please be mindful of your pillars. Keep them fast and consider using them only for security purposes. Try using map and jinja for handling other types of data that doesn’t need to be secured.

The Salt Docs Working Group meets every week on Tuesdasy at 3p MST / 2p PST / 22:00 UTC.
These sessions are co-working sessions, which means that we all work on Salt docs projects on the same Zoom call. We’ll provide support to each other while we work. Come join us!
The next Salt Docs working group meeting of the year: Tuesday, February 22 at 3p MST / 2p PST / 22:00 UTC.
Alyssa has been going through the docs backlog and there are a lot of issues that would be quick doc fixes for people to work on that would make a big difference to the community. Working on doc issues increases Salt’s overall usability and makes it easier for new users to onboard with Salt. If you’re new to Salt, it’s one of the quickest ways you can make a meaningful contribution.
Alyssa is slowly working on identifying these issues and is giving them the Good First Issue label in addition to the Documentation label. Check them out: Good First Issue + Documentation issues
Many of these issues would take Alyssa a long time to fix the ticket, but if a community member could work on it, they could get it done pretty fast.
Feel free to come to our Docs working group and work through a few tickets or set aside an hour of your week to knock out a few of these issues on your own. If you tag Alyssa on the PR, she can make sure your PR gets reviewed and merged quickly.

This is a new segment of the Open Hour! In this segment, Salt Project community members can share interesting projects they’re working on with Salt.
Shane Lee showcased the work he’s doing with Heist and Windows.
Shane demonstrated how he is able to use Heist to target minions that are Windows. He also made it possible to run Heist on Windows as well.
Check out the video of the Open Hour for the demo.

Open Salt Enhancement Proposals (SEPs)
- SEP 28 (inclusive language) – was obsoleted by SEP 34.
- SEP 29 (pkg beacon changes) – was accepted.
- SEP 26 (package Salt with Tiamat) – was accepted.
- SEP 23 (Salt file listing details) – was abandoned.
These SEPs are in the final comment period:
- Run salt-master as non-root
- ssh-configurable compression
- Add runtime registers to salt (on track to be abandoned)

The core team is adding “help wanted” labels to issues that would be great for community members to tackle. These issues are ones that the team would love to get merged or work on, but that they don’t have the bandwidth for. It’s a great way to help the project and get started working with Salt. Look through the issues with that label and see if something piques your interest: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/labels/help-wanted
Here’s a highlighted issue:
- Newlines may be rendered as literal `\n` – https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/30690

Q: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/pull/61550 – There was some discussion on this PR about changing the default output behavior in certain scenarios. Just wanted to put it out there to the group to see if anyone had issues with going down the deprecation path to change this?
- A: No one seems to have any immediate concerns about this course of action because it would help reduce output. The core team will discuss it and get back to you. We had a more robust discussion of the deprecation path that can be reviewed on the Open Hour video.