Builds with mvn just fine, but I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for? should do the job I think.

Small change to a more robust package download command (as borrowed from "install_tarball" script)

Any reason to only care about Ubuntu?

None at all, I think our options were deb or rpm file so we could support either download and include some more OS's. I am not certain but I think when ooking at the puppet service i saw a couple of other Debian-centric things happen so I thought the profile was already positioned that way as it stood, but I could be wrong, I've been digging through a lot of these recipes and services the last few days...

Hmm. Went back to Puppetlabs repo site(s), they no longer seem to publish the .rpms, at least not at the rpm.puppetlabs.com or from the website (that i saw, anyway) and the Debian versions seem to be different enough from version to version to require separate packages for each.

If we stick with .deb file install, I can add a user configuration to the recipe to choose which version of Ubuntu/Debian the Puppet install should be compatible with, and download using that info. If we want to do a more general/manual install of Puppet, I'll need to do a bit more research on what that should look like, since I am not a Puppet user myself.

-1 - I like the idea of standardizing properly, but not if that means we don't support non-Debian platforms.

Someone I work with was also having trouble because they could not use Ruby with Puppet any more. I think we have a choice of rpm or deb packages so thats better than just deb files. What is the alternative, Whirr not supporting Puppet? If Puppetlabs doesn't want anyone using the gem right now, what are our options?

I'm fine with installing packages from puppetlabs, I just want to be sure we can do it on both RPM and Deb platforms. If you can add a patch with RPM support, I'll go with it.

Attached patch fully generalizes the discovery of puppet. The newly introduced puppet.repourl property can be set to either a repo file/list file/repo rpm package/repo deb package hence the following would all work with the latest puppet:

# The best place to get Puppet for Ubuntu/Debian is from the Puppet labs repo
puppet.repourl=http://apt.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-lucid.deb
# The best place to get Puppet for RHEL/CentOS/Fedora is from the Puppet labs repo
puppet.repourl=https://yum.puppetlabs.com/el/6/products/i386/puppetlabs-release-6-2.noarch.rpm
# The best place to get Puppet for OpenSuSE/SLES is from the OBS
puppet.repourl=http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/eclipseagent:/puppet/SLE_11_SP2/

Please consider this for inclusion into 0.8.2

+1 - committing to trunk and 0.8