[chef-dev] Re: Dialect support and loading enhancements

[Joseph Holsten < >]

On 2013-09-19, at 20:37, Noah Kantrowitz 
<
 >
 wrote:

> https://github.com/opscode/chef/pull/997
> 
> At long last I've pushed up a completed-enough-to-use version of my 
> [dialects 
> proposal](https://gist.github.com/coderanger/a6e0c627d349f0712dcc). I won't 
> repeat the whole document here, but some highlights:
> 
> 1. Hooks to load Chef recipes and attribute files from formats other than 
> .rb
> 2. JSON and Yaml dialects for attribute files.
> 3. Root shortcuts for cookbook source files of which you commonly have only 
> one.
>    cookbooks/
>      apache2/
>        attributes.rb
>        recipe.rb
>        library.rb
> 4. Removal of the need for the default/ path segment under files/ and 
> templates/.
> 5. Ability to pass an array to #source on cookbook_file and template to 
> define your own lookup path similar to the current implicit one.
> 
> Personally I think all of these put together are an order of magnitude 
> improvement in ease of learning Chef and writing new cookbooks while not 
> losing any of the expressive power you want on the high end. This branch 
> should present no backwards incompatibilities, though I think it should 
> kick off a discussion separately about deprecating the implicit search path 
> on files/ and templates/ in favor of people using the new explicit search 
> path syntax for the rare occasions where such things are desired (and even 
> in those cases, it is generally just a few of the options in the current 
> search path). Any such deprecation would have to be over a very long time 
> though. I have opened https://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-4559 to track ;
> this patch. If anyone has any feedback please don't hesitate to shoot me an 
> email or comment on the pull request/ticket.

So much <3.

For those interested in how alternate formats can work well, here's the doc 
for saltstack's pydsl (closest to chef dsl today):
    http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/renderers/all/salt.renderers.pydsl.html
compared to their jinja + yaml format (similar to mustache + yaml from the 
proposal):
    http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/renderers/all/salt.renderers.jinja.html

I'm not sure we could ever write libraries or lwrps in non-ruby, but I 
definitely support it in recipes, attributes, metadata & templates.
--
~j

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