This is a new blog series that we would like to introduce. At Vox Pupuli, we receive many Pull Requests. We receive so much awesome code, that isn’t really appreciated. In the past, some of our members sent out tweets if they saw cool code. We now want to start a blog series with regular updates to appreciate the work of our collaborators and contributors.
We start the calender week 1 with a contribution from Paul Hoisington. He created a pull request for our yum module.
A breakdown of his code:
$_pc_cmd = [
'/usr/bin/package-cleanup',
'--oldkernels',
"--count=${_real_installonly_limit}",
'-y',
$keep_kernel_devel ? {
true => '--keepdevel',
default => undef,
},
].filter |$val| { $val =~ NotUndef }
We’ve an array of values and a selector statement (which deserves a dedicated post). We don’t know which value the selector will return, Undef is possible, but not desired. We need to filter anything from the array that is Undef. For newcomers: Undef is very similar to Nil in Ruby. So Paul applies the filter method to the array. It will apply a lambda to each value in the array. If it returns true, the value will be returned in a new array with all other values that also evaluated to true.
Now the cool part: NotUndef! Paul uses =~ to match the values against the NotUndef datatype. In most languages, =~ is used to validate against a regular expression. In Puppet, you can also evaluate against a datatype like String, Array or Undef (or many more). The NotUndef type is a meta type which basically applies to all types, exept for Undef. This type is rarely used and not well known, but still super helpful!
Thank you Paul for this cool contribution!
Did you spot some cool code as well? Write a short blogpost or write an email to our Project Management committee or just drop a note on our IRC channel #voxpupuli on Freenode.
I also published this talk at https://voxpupuli.org/blog/2019/01/01/code-of-the-week/