Puppet » Facter

Facter should support non-ruby facts, preferably in /etc/facter.d. It should support these facts being either executable, in which case the result is the value of the named fact, or in a data format such as yaml, in which case the data file is read in and interpreted as the fact value.

It probably makes sense to initially stick to yaml for data formats, since json doesn’t ship with ruby, and to also allow executable facts to return either a plain string or yaml.

Note that we can do this without supporting any kind of overriding, but it’d be much better if we supported multiple (configurable?) fact directories, with a search path. Thus, if Facter shipped with /etc/facter.d/myfactname and you wanted to override it, you could do so by creating a new file and putting it in a higher-priority location rather than editing a file distributed with the core.

Given we’re adding structured data support, namespaced facts would be supported with directory structures; e.g., /etc/facter.d/my/fact/name would resolve to my::fact::name.

Ideally, the long-term direction here would be not to require any pure-ruby facts, such that the Facter library could be rewritten in any other language and it would function the same, because all of its actual data is outside of ruby.