[[chef-dev]] Allowing plugins to be marked as required in Ohai

[Bryan McLellan < >]

Currently Ohai wraps plugins in a rescue block. If they fail for any
reason, most often because they require an optional gem that the user
does not have installed, we still chug along. In some circumstances,
these failures are unacceptable because Chef or a cookbook relies on
that data. OHAI-87 [1] is one example, where the ipaddress wasn't
being returned by Ohai. In that was, this was worked around by
enforce_path_sanity which shipped in Chef 0.10. Ohai inherits the path
configured by chef on fork (but not when run directly on the command
line).

Are the circumstances and use cases where we want to specify that
certain plugins must succeed or Ohai should fail? Should this be
easily configurable or something hardcoded with each release? Should
you be able to set it in a Chef recipe without changing an Ohail
configuration file?

-- 
Bryan McLellan | opscode | senior systems administrator
(c) 206.607.7108 | (t) @btmspox | (b) http://blog.loftninjas.org

[1] http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/OHAI-87