Augeas tasks are shown as changed, although the file wasn´t changed

Question

I have installed puppet-dashboard and noticed that all my augeas tasks are shown as "changed". I would expect that augeas automatically checks wether the value to be set is already set and in such case would do nothing.

My recipe:

$puppet_conf = "/etc/puppet/puppet.conf"
file { "${puppet_conf}": }

augeas { "puppet_conf":
        context => "/files/${puppet_conf}/",
        changes => [
                "set agent/report true",
        ],
        require => File["${puppet_conf}"],
}

Normal run when the value has already been set before:

info: Applying configuration version '1363882751'
debug: Augeas[puppet_conf](provider=augeas): Opening augeas with root /, lens path , flags 0
debug: Augeas[puppet_conf](provider=augeas): Closed the augeas connection
debug: Augeas[puppet_conf](provider=augeas): Opening augeas with root /, lens path , flags 0
debug: Augeas[puppet_conf](provider=augeas): sending command 'set' with params ["/files//etc/puppet/puppet.conf/agent/report", "true"]
debug: Augeas[puppet_conf](provider=augeas): Closed the augeas connection
notice: /Stage[main]/Puppet_agent/Augeas[puppet_conf]/returns: executed successfully

The date/time of the file has not changed, so it apparently doesn´t change the file. Though, puppet-dashboard shows the file as "changed". If I put in an "onlyif", that part won´t show up, but I don´t want to repeat everything in the onlyif, also I could only set one config option at a time.

Debian Squeeze
Puppet 2.6.2
Augeas 0.10.0

What is the proper way to configure this?

Answer 1

Thanks for the version info. It looks like you're hitting Puppet bug #11414, which is due to a combination of the new Augeas 0.10.0 and an old version of Puppet.

The provider in Puppet is misinterpreting the Augeas version number as being a very old version (string instead of proper version comparison) and it doesn't work as expected.

You'll need to either use Puppet 2.7.18 from squeeze-backports (or the Puppet Labs repo) which has the bug fix, or use an older or newer version of Augeas (1.0.0 or 0.9.0).