[chef-dev] paths as native attributes in chef or ohai?

[Blake Irvin < >]

One thing I love about Chef is that it shines a light on long-standing issues in systems management that the community has historically ignored because our environments are often very different.  By holding out the promise of a cross-platform, multi-environment abstraction layer, Chef gets us thinking about ways to make things better.

The number one issue I run into when using a cookbook written for and tested on platform X on platform Y is that X and Y don't keep userland binaries/libs/configuration files in the same places/paths.  Despite all our efforts to make cookbooks data/attribute driven, we still hard-code paths all over the place.

Here's my attempt at a remedy for this:  https://github.com/wanelo-chef/paths

With some more work, this cookbook can be highly intelligent about setting paths (like looking at package manager configs to figure out our default prefix/path for packages).

Is this something that we want in ohai/chef rather than a cookbook?  Do we want to encourage the community at large to use attribute-driven pathing?  (I think we do).

Blake