And it looks like a great release, too.
Thanks to your valuable feedback, we’ve completely rewritten the parser and evaluator, ironed out some kinks, and learned how these changes interacted with all of the Puppet manifests already out in the wild.
In short, the future parser is no longer in the realm of the future. It’s here, and available by default. Also, the enhanced Puppet language delivers more power and greater reliability with smarter, more compact, code that is more human readable than ever before.
I’m also glad to read that one of my “lessons learned in Puppet” horror stories of sudden major-version upgrades is being tackled with Puppet Collections.
Puppet Collections is the new way Puppet Labs will deliver Open Source Puppet to users. A Puppet Collection is a package repository whose contents we guarantee will work together — think of it like a Linux distribution, but for Puppet-related packages. This should provide a few significant improvements over our past layouts on package servers.
Each collection will be opt-in, so if you’re running ensure => latest, you’ll get the latest in the collection you’re using.
The versioning is a bit strange, but I’ll be able to live with that.
Collections are numbered with integers. The first one is Puppet Collection 1 (PC1) the next will be 2, and so on. The numbers have no significance other than PC2 is newer than PC1, etc.
Nice work Puppet Labs, I’m happy to see Puppet 4 out and released!