[chef] Forcing a downgrade/upgrade of an apt package

[Jacobo García < >]

Aló chefs,

I am writing a recipe for installing and going back from ruby enterprise edition to regular ruby in ubuntu. The guys at brightbox provide a nice apt repo for ree. In that repo ree is packaged to overwrite regular ruby locations.

The recipe that installs ruby enterprise from regular ruby basically adds a file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ruby-ee with the repository parameters, this notifies imediately an apt-get update, and then I have the following code that tries to install ruby.

packages = %w(ruby ruby-dev rubygems libopenssl-ruby libreadline-ruby librmagick-ruby librmagick-ruby1.8 rubygems1.8 ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev libopenssl-ruby1.8 librmagick-ruby1.8 libruby1.8)

packages.each do |p|

  package p do

    action [ :install, :upgrade ]

  end

end

The reverse operation is performed in a similar way, I just check if ree is installed, then I remove the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ruby-ee file, apt-get update, and the code above.

My problem: chef does not notice the change (apt-cache show ruby gives the candidate though.)

Is this a problem on how chef handles the apt resource? 

Should I pass an extra parameter to the package resource to force the "upgrade"?

Thanks.

Jacobo García López de Araujo
blog: http://robotplaysguitar.com
http://workingwithrails.com/person/13395-jacobo-garc-a