[chef-dev] Re: Re: CHEF-3762: LWRP DSL for subclassing needed?

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Monday, January 28, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Noah Kantrowitz wrote:

On Jan 28, 2013, at 2:45 PM, Bryan McLellan wrote:

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-3762

There's been some talk about adding a DSL for subclassing LWRPs. I've heard both sentiments that it would be useful and questions if it makes something justifiably easier.

Can those promoting it make a case? Can anyone else soap box about their own experience?

I've been pushing hard for this for a long time now. As some examples of places this would be directly useful, I've spent part of today reviewing a new Mercural resource/provider which has to subclass Chef::Resource::Scm and as such can't use the simpler LWRP syntax. Another example is any of the multitude of service resources which currently either duplicate code or use the "heavy" syntax. Beyond just subclassing built-in pieces, the application cookbook would gain a lot by allowing subclassing of individual sub-resources in places where things were mostly like a standard deployment but just need a little tweak, like (to use Django examples because that is what I'm familiar with) a requirements.txt in a non-standard place, or setting up the database connection a little differently. This would allow much more fine-grained overriding than is possible right now within the bounds of the LWRP system, and hopefully would reduce the number of times people copy-paste-fork parts of upstream cookbooks. In my bright and glorious LWRP-ified future this will only get more important over time, as I hope more cookbooks use LWRPs to provide internal modularity like this, just as you would see in any other OO API.

--Noah

Once you know about subclassing and so on, is it really that onerous to use the "heavy" syntax?

    class FooProvider < Chef::Provider::Scm

    end

...doesn't seem like a ton of work.

-- 

Daniel DeLeo