Add EL 9 support

[kenyon]

• delete Suse hiera data. Suse support was dropped from metadata.json in Drop Python 2, implement Python 3, replace virtualenv with native python 3 implementation, drop EPEL parameter #292 commit 77ea67b due to lack of working tests.
• metadata.json: Add EL 9 support
• Includes Allow puppet-python 7.x #388

[h0tw1r3]

Would it make sense to change hiera to search the os.family instead of (or in addition to) os.name?
centos 9, alma 9, rocky 9, rhel 9 all have the same python version (and likely always will in the same family).

[kenyon]

Would it make sense to change hiera to search the os.family instead of (or in addition to) os.name? centos 9, alma 9, rocky 9, rhel 9 all have the same python version (and likely always will in the same family).

Like I mentioned in #401 (review), I think it makes the most sense to eliminate the need to specify Python version in this module. But improving hiera.yaml is probably also a good idea.

[h0tw1r3]

Like I mentioned in #401 (review), I think it makes the most sense to eliminate the need to specify Python version in this module. But improving hiera.yaml is probably also a good idea.

That's not possible as the python module specifies "3" as the default, el-8's all ship with python 3.6, but puppetboard required python 3.8 - 3.11.

[kenyon]

Like I mentioned in #401 (review), I think it makes the most sense to eliminate the need to specify Python version in this module. But improving hiera.yaml is probably also a good idea.

That's not possible as the python module specifies "3" as the default, el-8's all ship with python 3.6, but puppetboard required python 3.8 - 3.11.

Yeah, I didn't look into the implementation details yet, but it doesn't make sense that every module using python should have to define the OS's default python version, right?

[h0tw1r3]

Yeah, I didn't look into the implementation details yet, but it doesn't make sense that every module using python should have to define the OS's default python version, right?

Unfortunately, it does as python code/applications (virtualenv's) have different python interpreter requirements... which is definitely out of the sysadmins control.

The underlying problem, as I see it, is that the puppet python module only supports managing a single version of python. So if you must support different versions, you can't do it in a consistent way with puppet.

[kenyon]

Yeah, I didn't look into the implementation details yet, but it doesn't make sense that every module using python should have to define the OS's default python version, right?

Unfortunately, it does as python code/applications (virtualenv's) have different python interpreter requirements... which is definitely out of the sysadmins control.

The underlying problem, as I see it, is that the puppet python module only supports managing a single version of python. So if you must support different versions, you can't do it in a consistent way with puppet.

I am just saying that the data about which version is the OS default should be centralized, so that other modules can look it up. That doesn't prevent overriding the default.

[kenyon]

Same comment as #388 (comment)

[kenyon]

Acceptance tests are hanging trying to install puppetlabs/puppetdb because we don't have a Forge release that supports stdlib 9. puppetlabs/puppetlabs-puppetdb#381 😡