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Comment by cultureulterior | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I don't think puppet sucks

Agreed. I work with Chef and it is my tool of choice but don't think that Puppet sucks.

The important thing is someone uses some form of Configuration Management. If people find Salt easier than Chef/Puppet/CFEngine/Ansible then great. At least they have something to build/scale their infrastructure.

The problem is most dev-ops and sysadmins don't know ruby and that's a HUGE disadvantage. In the end configuration management will often by done by sysadmins.

I'm only managing 24 machines with puppet, so nothing fancy, but I managed to do all of the stuff I needed without writing a single line of Ruby code.

That was handy for me too as while I'm somewhat familiar with Ruby, I'm no expert at all. I can read Ruby no problem and I can write ruby that's not-quite-idiomatic and I'm terribly slow at it.

I forgot to mention that just installing ruby is a HUGE PITA on anything but the most common OSes. It took me 3h last week to get it on a CentOS installed. And I don't even want to try to get it running on our Solaris hosts...

Point is: Python is the number one scripting language (after bash) for sysadmins just like Perl used to be.

yum install ruby

took you 3h? It may take slightly longer if you want 1.9, but it still exists in fedora so it should not take 3h to solve.

Yes I needed 1.9.3 for this silly software. And I had a little special setup so rvm failed to compile. I'm also very overwhelmed by rvm,gem,bundler etc... Python has pip,easy_install(old) and virualenv. Which are just easier to understand for me. Ruby is too much magic and is trying to do everything automatically (IMO).

Red Hat recently released Ruby 1.9.3 packages as part of "software collections"; I assume CentOS is rebuilding these and making them available the same as they do for other Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages.

https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_D...

Have you tried rbenv? Its easier to setup than rvm and doesn't take too long.

rbenv is a great way to get whatever version of ruby you want up and going fast. Install a couple dependencies, clone the git repo, and run the install.sh. I went from never using it to running on CentOS 6 in a half hour.

As a developer that primarily works on ruby, I can see it if he wanted 1.9.3. Most of the references you'll find on that tell you to use @environment_wrapper_of_the_month, and those are deep rabbit holes for people who know nothing about the language.

I support Ruby apps so Ruby is on every server anyways.

With that said you can use Omnibus Chef Installer now which includes a copy of Ruby just for Chef. Good for servers where you don't need Ruby or small servers that would take awhile to compile a newer Ruby.

Try https://rvm.io if you're having difficulty getting Ruby somewhere.

> It took me 3h last week to get it on a CentOS installed

This matches my experience with a significant amount of software on CentOS. Since CentOS is just a rebuild of RHEL, and RHEL is extremely conservative when it comes to new software, CentOS tends to be out of date at release and get progressively worse.

"out of date"? I think you mean, "stable".

That being said, we use third party repos for big projects like mysql and php on the assumption that a project that size is going to be thoroughly tested.

It's not that hard to get Ruby running on Solaris. Email me if you need help.

Puppet doesn't require you to do any Ruby.

Also, Salt is written in python, for which the same argument holds as well for almost all environments.

It's hard to find an O/S w/o python these days. In the env. I work in we don't have ruby at all installed (Solaris, CentOS, BSD, Windows).

Parents argument is different.

One doesn't need much ruby to get going with puppet. You need to learn the declarative puppet DSL, which is arguably an even bigger barrier. Automatic list expansion, for example, is a nice feature. But you can't have independent or nested variables, as with an imperative loop. So you wind up having to break each list into its own definition and then combine them all. The sysadmins I worked with were definitely not keen on having to think that way on a regular basis just to get some things done.

That said, I also disagree that puppet "sucks." It's good at what it claims to be good at so long as you can deal with its quirks.

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