[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#563550: puppetmaster - Undefined variable equal to empty

[Bastian Blank]

Package: puppetmaster
Version: 0.25.1-3
Severity: normal

The puppet manifest language uses empty variables the same way then
undefined ones. Many languages, for example perl and sql, have shown in
the past that this behaviour produces hard to find errors all over the
code.

Example:
lsb* are undefined if lsb-release is missing. A definition using this
needs to explicitely check for the lack of a value. It would be obvious
if it bails out on the variable access.

This is also different from the behaviour of the templating language,
erb bails out on undefined variables.

Bastian

-- 
Killing is stupid; useless!
		-- McCoy, "A Private Little War", stardate 4211.8