A discussion surrounding Chef 10 support has surfaced in the knife-server project. If you're not aware, knife-server is Fletcher Nichol's project to provide a knife plugin to build chef servers similar to how knife bootstrap works.
While the comment is against my fork, it's surrounding some patches that him, Dan Ryan and myself are working on that both add Chef 11 support and some other platform independence features.
The main thing to take away from this is that the chef-server bootstrap may or may not require chef 11 at some point in the near future.
I guess what concerns me is the official state of Chef 10 support in the wake of the Chef 11 release. I don't think anyone's claiming Seth's comments are official or even necessarily authoritative, but if this is to be relied on I think there are some concerns here that need to be addressed, namely, what the status of those relying on Chef 10 can expect.
To put this in context, as late as last April I was working with a team to get off of Chef 0.9, and that isn't a unique situation by any sense of the word. I don't think reasoning about the EOL of Chef 10, or even its supported nature, two weeks after Chef 11's GA release is something anyone should have to be doing.
The ideal thing I'd like to get out of this is some kind of minimal effort to ensure those who need Chef 10 can still get it installed easily.
I think the easiest thing would just be to allow us to point at bootstrap-$version.tar.gz for things that require a specific major version of chef. Theoretically, these should be pretty stable over time so the amount of maintenance burden should be pretty low for you guys as the distance between $version and the current state of things grows. And of course when things are EOL'd what ever happens, happens.
There might be a better solution that revolves around omnibus too, but having that cross-platform bit is one of the reasons the chef-solo bootstrap is so attractive. To be clear though I don't really care too much as long as I can still install Chef 10 on something that doesn't dictate my OS too. :)
Anyhow, I'd love to hear if there's any official stance on this or what people at opscode think so we can make more accurate decisions on how to support Chef 10 for future releases of knife-server.
Thanks!
-Erik