[chef] Re: Remote file considered harmful

[Bryan McLellan < >]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:40 AM, < "> > wrote:

First of all, they are badly named. Why isn't there a remote_template to
correspond with remote_file? What's "remote" about remote_file in Chef Solo?
Can we at least rename the little-used "file" to be "file_touch" so we can use
"file" instead of "remote_file" everywhere?

From an development perspective, you actually use File all the time, because Template and RemoteFile extend File, which prevents redundant code between the latter two. I feel like there used to be an attribute to File to specify the contents of the file, but I'm pretty sure that's a memory from using Puppet. Maybe we should add that, that is something else though.

I agree that the semantics of remote_file don't fit Chef Solo when you're assuming that you're getting the file from a Chef server, but the remote_file provider supports URIs in the source attribute as well, which is certainly likely to be remote even in Chef Solo.

So I agree only insofar as the naming can be a little tricky, but I feel like it is architected well and disagree there.

Bryan