[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Installing from OS Package vs Download

[KC Braunschweig < >]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:37 AM, Seth Chisamore 
<
 >
 wrote:
> The 'tomcat' cookbook also supports installation of tomcat 6 via packages on
> centos/rhel systems using the jpackage yum repository.  And as Noah
> mentioned, a separate source and package recipe is a good approach.  The
> 'default' recipe then chooses the appropriate recipe based on platform...or
> you can do a 'hard' override by selecting the appropriate recipe directly.

While this is a reasonable way to install from source if necessary,
I'd discourage anyone from doing this in practice on boxes you care
about (i.e. production systems or dev/qa systems in an enterprise
environment). If there isn't a package for your platform, grab the
source and build the package yourself. You won't get the benefits of
community testing of the build, but you'll still get the benefits of
package management to install, remove and manage dependencies for the
package. Bonus points for contributing your package build back to the
community (shout out to the folks on this list that have published
their chef and chef dependency packages that weren't publicly packaged
before!).

KC