[chef] Trying to understand user/group resources

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I've been doing some experimentation with the user/group resources and I'm
confused by some of the behavior. Here is a snippet that I fed to chef-solo:

group "mwhiteley" do
  gid 1000
end

user "mwhiteley" do
  comment "Matt Whiteley"
  uid 1000
  gid "mwhiteley"
  home "/home/mwhiteley"
  shell "/bin/zsh"
end

I then ran chef-solo starting from various states:

* neither exists
before:
after:
/etc/passwd:mwhiteley:x:1000:1000:Matt Whiteley:/home/mwhiteley:/bin/zsh
/etc/group:mwhiteley:x:1000:
* both created perfectly

* user exists
before:
/etc/passwd:mwhiteley:x:1000:100:Matt Whiteley:/home/mwhiteley:/bin/zsh
after:
/etc/passwd:mwhiteley:x:1000:1000:Matt Whiteley:/home/mwhiteley:/bin/zsh
/etc/group:mwhiteley:x:1000:
* group created, user[gid] changed

* group exists
before:
/etc/group:mwhiteley:x:500:
after:
/etc/passwd:mwhiteley:x:1000:500:Matt Whiteley:/home/mwhiteley:/bin/zsh
/etc/group:mwhiteley:x:500:
* user created, group[gid] not changed

* both exist
before:
/etc/passwd:mwhiteley:x:500:500::/home/mwhiteley:/bin/bash
/etc/group:mwhiteley:x:500:
after:
/etc/passwd:mwhiteley:x:1000:500:Matt Whiteley:/home/mwhiteley:/bin/zsh
/etc/group:mwhiteley:x:500:
* user[uid] changed, group[gid] not changed

I would like to know if this is a bug or if I just need to understand rules
about what will or won't be changed when encountering pre-existing resources.

I also noticed on the http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Resources page the
group[gid] isn't quoted while the similarly numeric user[uid] is quoted. When 
I
placed quotes on the group[gid] I got the following error:
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.8.10/bin/../lib/chef/mixin/params_validate.rb:140:in
`_pv_kind_of': Option gid must be a kind of Integer!  You passed "1000".
(Chef::Exceptions::ValidationFailed)

I appreciate someone pointing out my misunderstanding.

thanks,
-- 
Matt Whiteley 
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