[chef] Future of Opscode Cookbooks

[Joshua Timberman < >]

Hello Chefs!

We're making changes to the Opscode cookbooks repository[0] about what 
cookbooks we include and how we provide support for them. As a large number 
of people rely on our cookbooks, we want to be clear about the intentions of 
the repository, and how we plan to release and support cookbooks going 
forward.

The cookbooks in our GitHub repository are the only ones maintained by us. We 
will provide bug fixes and help in using them. Opscode Platform customers 
will get direct support in using our cookbooks, other assistance will be as 
it is now with best effort help via IRC, mailing list or questions/comments 
on the Community Site itself. Any other cookbook the community wants to exist 
should be maintained in their own source code repositories, github or 
otherwise, and published to the Community Site like ours are.

Over the time since its original release, the Chef project has matured, and 
in most cases changed quite dramatically. We also created a centralized site 
where the Chef Community can share their own cookbooks with other users[1]. 
All of Opscode's cookbooks are published to the site, and several members of 
the community have shared theirs as well. Since we see Chef cookbooks as 
individual packages for managing some component of an infrastructure, we 
think of the Community site as a package repository similar to other focused 
package sites such as rubygems.org or cpan.org. We will continue to release 
our supported cookbooks to the Community Site, and our supported, maintained 
cookbooks will be developed in the GitHub repository.

Cookbooks that we can reasonably support and maintain fall into three 
categories:

* Cookbooks used in our Quick Start Guides[2].
* Cookbooks used to set up a Chef Server installed with RubyGems[3].
* Cookbooks used to set up common infrastructure components.

As this implies, we will remove a number of cookbooks that no longer fall 
into those categories from our GitHub repository. Cookbooks that are 
deprecated will be marked as such on the Community Site, with a pointer to 
the replacement cookbook, where appropriate. All cookbooks will remain on the 
cookbooks site, and of course the GitHub repository will have the history so 
you would be able to go back in time to a previous point in time. If you are 
interested in taking over maintenance of a particular cookbook, we'd be happy 
to turn that over to you, by making you the maintainer on the Community Site. 
Without further ado, here is the list of cookbooks that we're going to remove 
from the GitHub repository. If you'd like to maintain any, please reply to 
this post.

* capistrano - deprecated: use the application cookbook (rails, django or php 
recipes set up a capistrano deployment structure).
* django - deprecated: use the application cookbook (django recipe).
* dynomite - deprecated: upstream project is no longer maintained.
* ec2 - deprecated: cookbook only sets attributes that were not used anywhere 
else.
* glassfish - unsupported: use "application" and "tomcat" for our recommended 
java stack deployment.
* instiki - unsupported: was used as a rails app deployment example, no 
longer relevant/useful.
* java_sun - deprecated: use 'java'.
* nanite - deprecated: use rabbitmq::chef for setting up chef-server's queue.
* one-shot - unsupported: doesn't fit in with any currently supported guides 
or usage patterns.
* packages - deprecated: this was only used with the older chef-server 
bootstrap recipes and its functionality is no longer needed.
* passenger_enterprise - unsupported: this cookbook doesn't fall into a 
deployment path for using passenger and rails applications.
* quick_start - deprecated: doesn't provide any real-world usefulness, only 
used for contrived example purposes.
* rabbitmq_chef - deprecated: use rabbitmq::chef.
* rails - deprecated: use application::rails to deploy rails applications.
* rails_enterprise - deprecated: use application::rails to deploy rails 
applications; installing REE should be done via a bootstrap template.
* redmine - deprecated: this was written as a Rails deployment example, and 
it doesn't fall under the RedMine project's recommended installation 
procedure.
* riak - unsupported: Basho Technologies (Sean Cribbs) will maintain this 
cookbook.
* ruby - deprecated: the desired default ruby should be installed on target 
nodes with the knife bootstrap sub-command.
* ruby_enterprise - deprecated: use a custom knife bootstrap template to 
install REE.
* rubygems - deprecated: this doesn't provide anything useful that a properly 
written Gemfile and using the bundler deployment in application::rails (or 
similar) couldn't already provide
* rush - unsupported: this is a toy and doesn't provide useful value
* solr - unsupported: this cookbook is limited in its usage and was ported 
from a legacy automation system
* teamspeak - unsupported: deprecated, see teamspeak3
* teamspeak3 - unsupported: replaces teamspeak, but no longer maintained by 
Opscode directly
* tomcat6 - deprecated: use "tomcat" cookbook.

Additionally, we have two new cookbooks specifically related to the Chef 0.10 
server installation:

* chef-server
* gecode

For a preview of what this looks like, the 0.10.0 branch[4] in the Opscode 
Cookbook repository reflects these changes now. Please let us know if you 
have any questions. If you would like to become the maintainer of any 
cookbooks listed above, let us know your Community site username.

Thanks!

[0]: https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks
[1]: http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks
[2]: http://help.opscode.com/kb/otherhelp
[3]: http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Bootstrap+Chef+RubyGems+Installation
[4]: https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/tree/0.10.0

-- 
Opscode, Inc.
Joshua Timberman, Director of Training and Services
IRC, Skype, Twitter, Github: jtimberman