[chef] a Cookbook pattern, the "corporate" repository for proprietary packages

[Bryan Berry < >]

We use a number of proprietary packages from HP, Oracle, and others that are not publicly available. With atomic-penguin's help, I have set up a corporate repository.

The many cookbooks currently assume that you will  load a proprietary package using a local url rather than a private deb/rpm repository. I find this a bit ugly and I frequently create my own versions w/ the minor change that I install w/ yum against my corporate repo rather than installing using the "source" method of the package resource.  For example, I do this for Oracle's jdk, which isn't available in a public rpm repository.

Dear chefs, do you prefer to use a url to load proprietary packages or to use a corporate repository? What could be the pros and cons of using a corporate repository?