[chef] Re: Re: How to push to upstream cookbook-vendor branch?

[Zac Stevens < >]

Hi Adam,

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 5:19 AM, Adam Jacob 
<
 >
 wrote:
> I honestly think it's important to call out that there are two, sometimes
> very, different workflows here. One is the consumption of a released
> cookbook - as an end user. The community site is geared for that workflow,
> and not really for the second workflow: collaboration and contribution. In
> particular, we don't want to be forcing peoples workflows for the software
> they choose to open source - we do want to provide a place for people who
> need them to get copies. Community is closer to CPAN, Rubygems, or EPEL than
> it is to GitHub, and that's by design.

Thanks for calling out those two workflows - though I'm now curious as
to whether my experience using community cookbooks is atypical.  While
a good handful have been suitable "off the shelf", the larger portion
have required work to be usable.

Do users on Ubuntu (or other non-Centos platforms) tend to find that
community cookbooks need no changes beyond their own site-specific
customisations?

The two main reasons we've had to make changes have been:
  1) patchy support for Centos, and,
  2) unparameterised configuration which wasn't suitable for our environment.

It's really easy to fix these things in situ (ie, in the cookbook
directory that's just been installed), but feels much more complicated
to take those changes and submit them upstream.  This is frustrating -
while it doesn't prevent me from achieving my goals, I feel like I
should be contributing my own learning back to the repository to make
the next person's job that bit easier.

Does this suggest a third workflow?  A low-friction process for
submitting fixes benefits the quality of cookbooks on offer to the
community, and may appeal to a different population of users than
those interested in releasing cookbooks they've created from scratch.

> We are adding source code browsing, though, and better integration for
> people with common workflows (like the Github workflow) for collaboration to
> make it easier to collaborate.

This is great to hear, and it's nice to see CPAN mentioned in the list
of analogous communities.  The Perl community have got an amazing
number of things right there, and the details are often overlooked.

Thankyou,


Zac