Is the accepted alternative to inheritance in puppet nodes class inclusion? - class

Question

After reading multiple style guides and trying to not use inheritance in my node definitions (as suggested by puppet labs), I would like to know what the common way of including classes in puppet without using inheritance.
I have been trying the following with my node definitions, but it does not seem to work:
# in module 'baseclass'
# baseclass.pp
class baseclass {
include xclass
include yclass
include zclass
}
# servernode01.pp
node 'servernode01' {
include baseclass
}
where xclass, yclass and zclass are funcitonal puppet classes and including them in the node servernode01 produces the desired state (i.e. the resources are applied to the node).
My question(s) are:
Is including classes in classes a good alternative to inheritance?
Are there some issues in the methodology I am using as an alternative to inheritance?
I ask my second question since it seems the nodes that include baseclass do not receive the resources defined in xclass, yclass and zclass.
My ultimate goal is to have a base class that will implement the minimum requirements which I specify.

Answer 1

yes, composition is better than inheritance in Puppet
your example should work fine
An alternative to include baseclass is class { 'baseclass': }. You need the latter if you want to use parameters, and also have into account that you can use include multiple times but not the class syntax, as puppet will complain with duplicate class definition.

Answer 2

The official puppet docs state clearly that inheritance should be used only really "sparingly". They actually name exactly two situations where this should happen:
when you want to overwrite a parmeter of a resource defined in the parent class
when you want to inherit from a parameters class for standard parameter values
see http://bit.ly/1r1RO0K
So yes, this is clearly better, even with official blessing :)