Something other than https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/ac45fe2b783708f64cb3a28f21ee92673e1f3216/lib/puppet/parser/functions.rb#L161 ???

Something other than https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/ac45fe2b783708f64cb3a28f21ee92673e1f3216/lib/puppet/parser/functions.rb#L161 ???

@ewoud Found it! https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/ac45fe2b783708f64cb3a28f21ee92673e1f3216/lib/puppet/pops/model/factory.rb#L969

@ewoud Found it! https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/ac45fe2b783708f64cb3a28f21ee92673e1f3216/lib/puppet/pops/model/factory.rb#L969

ah, interesting

what kind of odd archeology lesson are we listening to today?

so the whole statement option to newfunction() does nothing?

I'm pleased I didn't have to resort to getting @josh or @helindbe here to explain it to us! 🙂

or only signify that it has no return value, but puppet-strings doesn't understand that?

Maybe he is needed after all! Why was the idea of having a function that explicitly never returned anything left out of the 4x api spec.

anyway... I don't think converting ensure_packages to a 4x function is breaking because of this. One possible reason it could be though is if there are any 3x functions calling it internally. Since this is a module, and not core puppet, I think I can live with that.

perhaps you can end with nil and add a return_type Undef?

yeah, suppose so. I could also add a 3x shim with deprecation notice.

like is done in eg. https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/ac45fe2b783708f64cb3a28f21ee92673e1f3216/lib/puppet/parser/functions/contain.rb#L27

like is done in eg. https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/blob/ac45fe2b783708f64cb3a28f21ee92673e1f3216/lib/puppet/parser/functions/contain.rb#L27

@ewoud Done. Do you know if it's possible to get puppet strings to ignore a file?

I don't think it is. a

@ignore_me

tag would be nice!

@Alex Fisher you mentioned me, and I did see some questions - are there things you want to know more about?

the question was about statement functions in the v3 functions api and what the v4 equivalent would be

or really, a function without a return value

The history lesson here is that some things that were thought of as statements in puppet were implemented as functions and it was possible to call any function without parentheses. This did however create a horrible grammar with lots of issues (i.e all the WAT up util puppet 4).

All functions in puppet 4 have a return value - just use nil in Ruby, i.e. undef in puppet.

The 3x distinction between functions with/without rvalue is no longer applicable.

that sounds like what I was also suggesting, thanks for confirming

The only thing the “non r-value” marker did was to make sure nil was returned instead of the value from the 3x function. This may still be the case for 3x functions as some of them were poorly written and they could return something that the puppet language cannot deal with - i.e. a value that is a of a Ruby data type that will make things go bad later.

the function in question was ensure_packages() from stdlib, which calls ensure_resource

There are some other distinctions regarding functions - some functions need to pass the caller’s context on to a function it calls - if you look at the specification of 4x functions you see there is something called a “system function” which has an API with more functionality.

I'm not sure what the return type should be, nil/undef sounds safest to me

that is a good choice, unless there is something else that is meaningful to return - which there may not be.

Does the

ensure_resource

function need to get the context of the caller to

ensure_packages

?