[chef] Re: Re: Check for changes in a data bag.

[John Hanks < >]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Seth Falcon 
<
 >
 wrote:
> 1. There is a package resource that will use an appropriate package
> provider based on the OS (yum is the default for Redhat and CentOS).  If
> you haven't tried it, you might try using that instead of executing yum
> directly.  One advantage is to make your recipes easier to port to other
> Linux flavors.

This would be ideal, except that the package resource only supports
rpms, not 'yum groupinstall'. I get away with a much shorter list of
individual rpms to maintain by using groups. Ideally I'd add
groupinstall support to the yum provider, but I'm not that chef-smart
yet.

> 2. A common pattern is to simply rerun and let the resources figure out
> if work needs to be done (in this case package installs).  And the
> package resource should do a reasonable job of only doing the
> installation work if the requested package is not already installed.

I think this is common most likely because it makes sense. For now I'm
going to just let yum rerun for each chef-client run. If I decide to
try to make it fancy then I'll tackle adding groupinstall support to
the yum package resource.

jbh