[chef] Re: apt-get update strategy

[Michael Hale < >]

Maybe a feature could be added to the package resource/providers to
handle updating the package caches once per run?

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 5:45 AM, Luke Biddell 
<
 >
 wrote:
> A recent failure in the apache cassandra apt repo got me thinking
> about the way I've assembled my cookbooks. I have the apt cookbook
> first in my run and do an update. The repo being down gave me the
> classic "apt-get update returned 100" error within chef.
>
> The failure meant that none of my recipes ran against the node (and
> updated our application war file), despite the fact that the node had
> previously been converged and all the required apt packages were
> already installed.
>
> My chef run needs to be resilient to those kinds of failures as once a
> node is initially converged and all apt packages installed, apt
> doesn't need to do an update (I don't do package :upgrade at the
> moment).
>
> So what I'd ideally like is to be able to trigger an apt-get update on
> the first package which requires installing. If no packages require
> installing, no apt-get update is performed. The fact an update has
> been performed needs to be recorded as we don't want to do it for
> every package that's installed as it will kill performance. Once is
> enough per chef run unless we add/remove a sources.list.d entry (which
> I already handle using :notifies).
>
>
> Opinions welcome, am I looking and an LWRP?
>