A first positive experience with ruby: Patching puppet

So far I didn't have much experience with ruby. The few lines of code I've written in that language reminded me too much of perl. And I'm not really a fan of the perl syntax. But today ruby managed to convince me in the area of unit testing.

The problem

I'm bound to stick to ruby as I decided that ruby-based puppet will provide a central element of the next Kolab2/Gentoo version. While it provides some nice LDAP integration features these are not quite sufficient for Kolab. Puppet can grab some host parameters from LDAP and integrate these into the host configuration. The problem for Kolab2/Gentoo is the limitation to some LDAP parameters. Actually these have to be real LDAP attributes that have been defined in a schema.

As I have already argued on the Kolab mailing list it does not make much sense to define attributes in a schema if you want to use such parameters for configuration of a large set of possible applications (postfic, openldap, cyrus, ...). In this case it makes more sense to use the approach also used by the Horde LDAP schema: specifying a single attribute that uses a string value to specify parameters with arbitrary names. E.g. ldapAttribute:"one=two" in order to define parameter "one". Only the "ldapAttribute" will have to be defined in a schema while the code using this parameter handles converting the string into the final paramter.

I wrote a short patch for puppet to implement this. After a short while I got a positive response but the patch was considered insufficient as it lacked any tests.

A simple solution

I admit I was slightly worried because learning to handle just another test framework in a language I have nearly no clue about was something I did not fancy at all. And that was the first really positive surprise about ruby: Using the test framework and successfully writing unit tests in it was a matter of half an hour. Even though it required mocking the LDAP connection.

The testing allowed me to reconsider my expectations concerning the patch and to fix a problem of my initial version. I submitted the new version shortly afterwards and hope it will find its way into the repository now.

Well done, ruby. Let me see what else you can do in order to convince me that you are indeed a good thing...