[arch-general] Arch Linux support in puppet

[Thomas S Hatch]

I am posting this to venture an opinion, and see if anyone has any ideas on
how best to handle this situation.

I am working with the puppet developers to help improve Arch Linux support
in puppet (for those of you unfamiliar with puppet, it is an amazingly
crucial component in datacenter management - http://www.puppetlabs.com).

Puppet can automate the starting and stopping of systems services as well as
managing if they are set to start on boot. In most Linux distributions
flagging a system service to start on boot is done with an application like
chkconfig and the order in which the system services start up is pre
determined by the distribution.
Arch Linux uses a much simpler approach to system services, the DAEMONS
array in the rc.conf. The problem faced with an automation system in this
scope is that the boot order of services is not predetermined.

Right now the best idea we have been able to come up with is to have puppet
simply append the named services to the end of the DAEMONS array in the
rc.conf, but I wanted to ask the community if anyone had any alternative
ideas on how this could be done.

The ticket containing the discussion on the matter can be found here:
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/6697

Thank you for your ideas!

-Thomas S Hatch
-Arch Linux Trusted User