soft fail on missing ipaddress gem

[fraenki]

Starting with version 0.5 the ipaddress gem is required. I'm OK with this, but if the gem is missing the whole puppet run fails (which is a bad thing after all):

Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
Info: Retrieving plugin
Info: Loading facts
Error: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 400 on SERVER: Evaluation Error: Error while evaluating a Function Call, Could not autoload puppet/type/network_config: cannot load such file -- ipaddress at /etc/puppet/environments/development/modules/profile/manifests/os/network.pp:164:3 on node xxx.example.com
Warning: Not using cache on failed catalog
Error: Could not retrieve catalog; skipping run

What this means is that it's not possible to install the required gem if the network module was already included (i.e. by the ENC). This makes it hard to use this module in an environment with massive automation and auto-deployed VMs.

The gem is only used to provide (better) validation, so my proposal is to not kill the puppet run if the gem is missing, but instead send a clear warning message:

Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
Info: Retrieving plugin
Info: Loading facts
Warning: /var/lib/puppet/lib/puppet/type/network_config.rb:6: ipaddress gem was not found
Info: Caching catalog for xxx.example.com
Info: Applying configuration version '1461246353'
Notice: Finished catalog run in 2.77 seconds

[jyaworski]

@fraenki derp. Thanks.

[igalic]

alternatively, we could use this simple regex: voxpupuli/puppet-tea#2 (comment)