[chef] Re: How to deal with cookbook dependence for other Distro/OS's

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Oct 20, 2011, at 3:32 PM, Zuhaib Siddique wrote:

> So it seems some of the cookbooks from Opscode by default set depends 
> statements in their metadata.rb for cookbooks that are required by a 
> particular OS/Distro.

Yup.  I see that throughout all (or almost all) of the cookbooks.

>  In the case of say tomcat cookbook it sets jpackage as a dependence but 
> you only need that for RPM base Distro's.  Since I am deploying on a Ubuntu 
> box I am not included jpackage in the run list and that made it very 
> unhappy.  So I just removed it from the metadata.rb but I am just wondering 
> if this is what is expected to be done by the cookbook provided by opscode?

I have the reverse problem -- I'm on CentOS, but all (or almost all) of the 
cookbooks I pull down have massive Ubuntu/Debian dependencies built into 
them.  I end up having to figure out how to port the cookbook over to CentOS 
before I can actually use it.  Sometimes this isn't a great deal of hassle, 
and sometimes it is quite a bit more hassle than I had anticipated.

I generally wrap all the obvious stuff in "case node['platform'] ... when" 
statements.  But, for example, there are some cookbooks that depend on things 
like apt, even though they don't actually use apt to install packages -- at 
least, not on CentOS.

I've tried to contribute all my changes back to the project, so that 
hopefully others won't have to go through quite as much pain as I have done.  
But this is a young company and there is a lot of work to do.

-- 
Brad Knowles 
<
 >
SAGE Level IV, Chef Level 0.0.1