[chef] Update on the future of Opscode's cookbooks post

[Joshua Timberman < >]

Hello Chefs!
This is an update on the post we made a couple weeks back regarding the 
future of Opscode’s cookbooks and cookbooks repository. We are going to 
switch master branch to reflect the changes that have been made in the 0.10.0 
branch this week. Aside from removal of a number of cookbooks (which has been 
done in the 0.10.0 branch), we’ve made several other important changes you 
should be aware of.

Chef Environments

Several cookbooks that used search also used an “app_environment” attribute 
which generally came from a role of the same name. This has been replaced 
with the node’s chef_environment. If you don’t specify an environment for the 
node, _default will be used instead. This may have adverse effects if you’re 
using multiple “environment roles”, so you should be careful about upgrading 
cookbooks to the newer version. The following cookbooks on the community site 
do not have this change as of the stated version:

application 0.99.9
database 0.99.0
haproxy 0.8.1
munin 0.10.1
nagios 0.4.4
radiant 0.11.3

Newer versions of these cookbooks released to the community site will use 
Chef 0.10′s environments.

If you’re using the cookbook repository directly, the commit for this change 
in the repository is93aedac, you’ll want to make sure you have not updated to 
that commit until you’re ready to use Chef 0.10′s environments.

Metadata JSON

We maintain cookbook metadata as Ruby DSL files and let knife generate the 
metadata as JSON. In the updated repository, we have removed the 
metadata.json files. The reason is, prior to Chef 0.10.0 the metadata was 
generated in the cookbook directory as “metadata.json” every time a cookbook 
upload was done. Depending on the local system’s Ruby version, this might 
cause the file content to be different. When using the Ruby DSL metadata.rb 
file, there is no need to generate the metadata.json file by knife (cookbook 
upload and site share commands). To simplify maintenance and prevent these 
from possibly being forgotten and stale, we simply removed them from the 
repository. If you prefer the JSON file, you can generate it and remove the 
metadata.rb file in your own repository.

This change in Chef is reflected by the following tickets:

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-1311
http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2210


Consistency


We’re not quite done, but we’re actively working to make the cookbooks more 
consistent. What this means:

Attributes will use the quoted string notation, e.g. 
“node['apache']['listen_ports']“.
Each cookbook will have a README.md. We chose markdown because it is more 
universally parsable by tools and text editor plugins than RDOC.
We’ll continue to work on these tasks after we’ve moved the branches around 
in the repository.

Upcoming Steps

The branch formerly known as “0.10.0″ is now “future”. We’re going to take 
the following steps with regard to the repository this week.

Ensure the current master is updated.
Rebase the “future” branch with current master.
Tag repository with “future-freeze” to reflect the point in time where the 
cookbooks are now.
Create a “future-freeze” branch at this same point in time. This is where 
users who use the GitHub repository as a whole repository, or sub-module 
should be updated. As the name implies, this will be frozen, and we won’t 
actively maintain it.
Merge the current working branch, “future” into master. This will reflect the 
changes described in the previous blog post and above.
Push master, the “future-freeze” tag and upload cookbooks to community site.


Once the master branch reflects what we’ve planned here, we’ll maintain 
“master” as we did before. We’re also going to release new versions of the 
cookbooks to the Community Site.


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