[chef-dev] Re: symlinks (CHEF 2749 2389 2747)

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Nov 28, 2011, at 6:42 AM, 

 
 wrote:

> - http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2749

Speaking only for myself, a symlink cannot have ownership and permissions of 
its own.  That's why it's shown as mode 777 in both of the "before" and 
"after" blocks.  So, this is a non-issue.  POSIX file semantics may be 
tripping you up, but that's not a problem with Chef.

Perhaps Chef could be more explicit about testing for symlinks and bombing 
out if you try to apply operations to them which should be applied only to 
regular files or directories, but I think the better solution is that you 
should write your cookbooks and recipes in such a way that this does not 
become a problem.

> - http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2389

It's hard for a program to know what path should be applied to a command used 
with a relative path, unless you introduce the concept of an explicit current 
working directory.  Otherwise, what you think is your current working 
directory may in fact not match at all, and therefore the behaviour of the 
program could be very unexpected.

So, I agree with your comment that this needs some fleshing out in the 
provider.

> - http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2747

I've gone over this one a couple of times and I'm still not quite 
understanding what the problem is or what should be done about it.  But maybe 
that's just me and I haven't have enough coffee yet this morning.

> what kind of fixes would you accept ?

For #1, I'm not seeing that anything in Chef is broken.  For #2, I think the 
provider should be fleshed out, but in the meanwhile maybe Chef could be more 
explicit in bombing out with an appropriately descriptive error.  For #3, I 
need to understand the problem better.

-- 
Brad Knowles 
<
 >
SAGE Level IV, Chef Level 0.0.1