[chef] Centralized cookbook-library repos vs distributed cookbook repos

[Hedge Hog < >]

Hi ,

Over the last few days I have been lightly using some Chef cookbooks.
One issue I have run into, even at this early stage, is tracking what
is going on among the various github 'cookbook library' repositories.
While it is early days, these cookbook-library repo's are already
impressive. The large fork count actually seems to be the problem. I
find it next to impossible to see who has made what changes to
cookbook Y.
I also find it nigh impossible to see just how some of the cookbooks
differ between libraries.

I am wondering why git submodules are not used by the community?

The Chef user base is large enough that there would seem to be enough
benefits to justify the additional git commands.  Besides, rake tasks
could take some of the pain out of tracking, updating and contrbuting
back.

If there was a cookbook account on github with multiple collaborators,
each application/service cookbook could have its own project under
this account.
It would also be possible for more people to volunteer to maintain a
'reference' cookbook for their favourite application, using their own
Github account, and have this as a submodule of a community
cookbook-library.
Everyone else could track these individual cookbook projects as a
submodule of their own 'cookbook-library' project.

To my mind the benefits to each cookbook becoming a first class Git
project would be:
 - More applications have one reference cookbook with several
site-cookbooks to accomdate/illustrate different
approaches/requirements.
 - Easily track what people have forked over in a specific cookbook.
 - Users can pick and choose specific cookbooks rather than taking all
of several monolithic library repo's of 80+ cookbooks.
 - Whenever required each cookbook can be tagged with a Chef/Ruby/OS
version and submodules then point to just that tag.
 - Settling on a common naming prefix, say 'cc-' (Chef Cookbook), we
could readily search google and github for these types of projects.

I'm not a Git or Chef guru so I am wondering if I have overlooked somthing?

Regards

-- 
πόλλ' οἶδ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα
[The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.]
  Archilochus, Greek poet (c. 680 BC – c. 645 BC)
http://wiki.hedgehogshiatus.com