Move the gem provider logic from puppet-hiera to extlib

[rski]

I'm working on voxpupuli/puppet-network#168, which requires using the gem provider. As @bastelfreak pointed out, there are more than one gem providers and the correct one needs to be selected. This is already implemented in puppet-hiera:
https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-hiera/blob/master/manifests/params.pp
I wouldn't like to just copy this into puppet-network, plus it might be needed again in the future in another module.
So, would it be possible to move it from puppet-hiera to extlib? Is it the right place to move it to or is there a better one instead?

[bastelfreak]

we've this logic block copy'n pasted into several modules. we should place it here and make a fact out of it?

[ffrank]

Can this become a custom function rather than a fact? I'd like to avoid more Ruby code on each and every agent in favor of centralized logic on the master.

[rnelson0]

I don't think so, because it needs to be evaluated on the agent, not the master.

[ffrank]

As far as I can tell, all that's needed from the agent are facts like is_pe, pe_version, or puppetversion. The current implementation does the computation in a params class, which cannot be readily shared between modules. But it happens master-side (in the manifest compiler), unless I'm mistaken. So it should be possible to boil down the respective params classes to invoke a (common) function that returns the appropriate gem provider based on those fact values, or perhaps a hash of all the values that can be helpful for the different modules. (Each module will still need to extract the hash values into discrete variables.)

[b4ldr]

This seems old and as its talking about the puppet-hiera gem i'm guessing now obsolete?