roles

[snacktime <snacktime@gmail.com>]

I'm working on a project for automating ec2 using chef solo, and have a basic role system of our own in place.  I'm trying to figure out if the ability to attach a json ball to each role is going to cause problems.  Right now you can attach json to each role, and I merge all json balls for each role into one json ball to hand off to chef solo.  The danger is that different roles will have duplicate json entries with different values, and when stuff is merged things start to break.  It's also going to depend a lot on how people use the json.  Putting more in attribute files and less in the json will help.

So right now we are are attaching json to each role, and at run time doing a shallow merge.  I'm thinking that maybe generating warnings in the ui when there are conflicting keys might help.  I really like being able to define everything in roles instead of per server, but eventually we need a better strategy for how to handle role specific data.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Chris