Corrective changes because of new environment-parameter in renew

[sircubbi]

Affected Puppet, Ruby, OS and module versions/distributions

• Puppet: 8.9.0
• Distribution: EL8/EL9
• Module version: 11.1.0

How to reproduce (e.g Puppet code you use)

use letsencrypt::renew without any additional parameters

What are you seeing

• Notice: /Stage[main]/Letsencrypt::Renew/Cron[letsencrypt-renew]/environment: defined 'environment' as (corrective) on every run

What behaviour did you expect instead

• no corrective changes should be reported

Any additional information you'd like to impart

The change was introducted by #288. When looking at the discussion the new parameter was firstly defaulted to be undef, but later changed to an empty array (for removing any already existing environment). Unfortunately this produces an uncorrective change if no environment is used at all (could be that the cron-ressource is the root-problem).

I would really like to set the new parameter defaulting to undef and restore the previous behaviour.

[Dan33l]

I have some CI using this module with real certificats requested to LE staging CA. Now this CI does not run idempotently. So, i confirm that https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppet-letsencrypt/commit/9eddbb1d60ed9bc4938e8656ea8f32466b8eec25 introduce unexpected behavior.

Trace :

  Info: Using environment 'production'
  Info: Applying configuration version '1726063684'
  Notice: /Stage[main]/Letsencrypt::Renew/Cron[letsencrypt-renew]/environment: defined 'environment' as 
  Notice: Applied catalog in 8.17 seconds

[Dan33l]

The core module puppetlabs-cron_core have a provider that accept value absent for property environment https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-cron_core/blob/main/lib/puppet/type/cron.rb#L325.

Perhaps a better default value is absent, instead of empty array.

Edit : When environment is empty (like with []), the provider prefetch :absent: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-cron_core/blob/main/lib/puppet/provider/cron/crontab.rb#L224

So using empty array or absent is equal.

[Dan33l]

After some tests and pry usage, modifying puppetlabs-cron_core it looks to be idempotent when environment => [] https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-cron_core/pull/77