Puppet

This ticket is meant as an investigation into general problems with the following syntax:

file { '/some/file/or/directory':
       mode => _____
}

In theory, any of the following could be entered where ____ is:

• 0
• 1
• 000000000
• 0123
• 1365
• ‘0’
• ‘0000’
• ‘0777’
• “0”
• “0123”
• “644”
• “– – – – – – – – – –”
• “– r w S r w S r w –”
• “8000”
• “81ff”

For instance, what should be valid here? How should puppet store (internally) the information you supply? What should happen when invalid input is supplied? Because Ruby is a dynamically typed language and because some joker decided that prefixing a number with a zero specifies an octal number, Puppet is left with some lingering bugs; and, even when a decision on syntax is made, backwards compatibility is not an easy task.

This bug report was spurred on by (but is not identical to) my other [bug report#8255]. That bug is just for the defaults (which is a puppet system also need of some TLC).

[This pastie] represents my first attack at actually figuring out what’s going on. It is nowhere near sufficient, and it’s not in test form (since I don’t know how to write tests yet).

There are probably several bugs that are caused by this inconsistency. And directories are not immune, either.