[chef] Re: GitHub workflow for open source cookbooks

[Hedge Hog < >]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 12:29 AM, Eric Hauser 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Hi,
> We have a normal chef style cookbooks repository on GitHub with about 30
> cookbooks or so in our site-cookbooks directory.  Since I only want to open
> source a subset of them, I cannot just make our repository public.  I was
> thinking about just setting up a second public repository and using git
> filter-branch to move the cookbooks we want to open into it.  That seems
> like it work well for the initial release, but I wanted to make ongoing
> maintenance easy well.  Assuming I don't change the directory names, I
> believe I might be able to cherry-pick from the private repository to keep
> the public cookbooks up to date.  The other alternative I thought was
> filter-branch'ing a new public repository, forking it and making the fork
> private.  This requires more coordination with the other guys using our
> repository and I'm not sure if you can send a pull request to a public
> repository from a private one.
> Anyone have a good suggestion? Thanks.

If you follow the opscode convention of <any-repo-name> with cookbook
as folder the we can probably track that as upstream in
github.com/cookbooks.
The thought was to have github teams per-cookbook, so you could be
added to your cookbook's team if you wanted, and could soliicit others
to join.
Just how teams are formed and regulated is an open issue - thoughts?
This team would manage community contributions to that cookbook,
handle issues and pull requests, etc.
The idea is:
- master branch tracks upstream, in this case your repo, in other
cases 37signals or opscode.
- qa branch is for community contributions
- various teams should try to ensure that their cookbooks play nice
with other cookbook's qa branches, it not its a bug - for which
cookbook is for the various team members to debate - hopefully in
public on the issue tracker.

That said we are still feeling our way in discovering what works for
people. jnewland has made some nice contributions with his knife
plugin and offering to run the cookbooks-bot.
The objective is to try and facilitate contributions from those 400+
forks of various cookbooks, and to try and bring to the surface
cookbooks for less known applications.

Feed back welcome.

HTH



-- 
πόλλ' οἶδ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα
[The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.]
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