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

[Adam Jacob < >]

First off, thanks for thinking this through so well, and having the patch to match. Awesome.

I have a couple of questions/statements/observations:

1) Do other people actually think the directory structure of a cookbook is the biggest barrier to learning? This confuses the crap out of me - but I'm the one that inflicted the directory structure on you, so perhaps I'm an awful judge.

2) It feels like this could be accepted in pieces, depending on how we all feel about it. For example, 3 and 4/5 are to separate features, and how I feel about them is totally not influenced by how I feel about dialects. It makes sense to me that 4/5 should be adopted - we cause more confusion with the single copy pattern than we do delight, and nobody looses out - it's easy enough to implement it if it turns out you need it.

3) My concern about dialects is really that, in the end, you wind up hitting a wall. In the grand tradition of manipulexity and whipuptude, we know there is a path that can provide both (the ruby dsl), but that we think there are some barriers to it's full whipuptidunal potential (too many directories, etc.) Is it really simpler to learn the syntax from yaml, and all the gotchas that might be implied there, than to learn the basic syntax that you know scales moving forward? I think ansible and salt both provide a delightful experience of immediacy to the consumer, and that experience is a great one to mimic - but I'm not sure I think that path is because you're writing YAML rather than ruby. Is this simply because I know more than one programming language and have no inherent fear of learning another one anymore?

Best,

Adam

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Noah Kantrowitz < " target="_blank"> > 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.

--Noah

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Opscode, Inc.
Adam Jacob, Chief Dev Officer
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