Background

In earlier SIMP releases (5.0–6.3), managing multiple Puppet environments with corresponding SIMP assets was cumbersome and risky.  SIMP 6.4.0 removed some of these barriers by making Puppetfile-based workflows the preferred mechanism to deploy Puppet modules and environments:

• Tools like r10k or Code Manager are now expected to deploy Puppet modules or Puppet environments.
• The simp environment tool was introduced to help users maintain each Puppet environment and its corresponding SIMP "extra" environment.
• SIMP no longer modifies files under environment directories unless the user initiates the action with tools like simp environment.

However: although these improvements made deploying Puppet environments possible, it didn't make them safe.  During the development of SIMP 6.4.0 it became apparent that the simp environment workflow was inadequate to handle the full Puppet environment lifecycle:

• The convention of breaking out writable and secondary SIMP data by Puppet environment was arbitrary and made it necessary to adopt workarounds like simp environment new [--copy|--link],
• It would be too easy to permanently lose data from linked environments with the proposed simp environment rm command

Puppet Environments and SIMP Assets

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