[chef] Re: Re: Contributing to Cookbooks (was chef & hoptoad)

[Joshua Timberman < >]

Ohai!

On Jul 15, 2010, at 4:31 PM, Alex Soto wrote:

> First I mainly spend my time with chef developing cookbooks, so how would I 
> 'contribute' a cookbook while not incurring a lot of overhead ?  For 
> example, I create a cookbook that I haven't seen in the wild, I'd like to 
> publish it for others to use and enhance, but since it's in my private 
> repo, how would I do that?

If you would like to simply publish a new cookbook that doesn't "exist" in 
the wild yet, the best place to put that is the Opscode cookbooks site.

Then other people can discover and use your cookbook by downloading it with 
the 'vendor branch' workflow.

> One idea would be that I have another cookbooks repo where I publish the 
> cookbook and be able to import it using the existing vendor stuff knife 
> provides but use it against other repo's than just the cookbooks site.

Currently knife only supports the Opscode cookbooks site, since it provides 
an API that we can use directly. I do not knife if the dev team has plans to 
implement support for other sites or methods by which to 'vendor' cookbooks. 
The advantage of the Opscode site vs say GitHub is that it integrates well 
with the Platform, and its a better known quantity for the API usage. But 
I'll let Adam or Dan speak up about potential roadmap topics in that regard.

> Secondly, I've run into times where I have found bugs in chef that I've 
> traced into the code and figured out 'why' its broke.  I've gone ahead and 
> reported the bugs, but I'd love to be able to just fix it myself.  However 
> I end up just working around the problem in my cookbooks because I'm not 
> sure how I would fix chef and then deploy it so my nodes can take advantage 
> of my fix since in some clients I have pre-built AMI's with chef 
> pre-installed, but I'm transitioning to the bootstrap way.  In either case, 
> I've now forked chef and taken some burden of responsibility of packaging 
> my own chef.  So far I haven't done that because of the extra burden.  I'd 
> love to hear any tips on making that easier.


If you have found bugs in Chef itself and know how to fix them, we'd love a 
topic branch in your fork of the Chef repo that we can merge into master. 
That does of course require a contributor license agreement, which I see you 
are on the list of 'approved contributors' already, so thank you! Follow the 
working with git flow on the wiki page I linked and you should have a path to 
victory. If you need assistance with development, particularly with updating 
or adding feature/unit testing for your code, please drop by #chef-hacking or 
post to the chef development list and someone will be able to help you. We 
can't help if we don't know what your needs are :-).

Thank you!

-- 
Opscode, Inc
Joshua Timberman, Senior Solutions Engineer
C: 720.334.RUBY E: