[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Ruby, Chef, Omnibus and you!

[Alex Kiernan < >]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 4:02 AM, Brad Knowles 
<
 >
 wrote:
> On Dec 30, 2011, at 8:40 PM, Alex Howells wrote:
>
>> Whilst I appreciate you will never cater to all needs, and there is a
>> core of 'power user' out there who will always do their own thing, the
>> recommended route for deploying chef-client (which seems to be heading
>> in an Omnibus direction) needs to cater for the masses, and that
>> *does* mean things like SELinux (amongst other things) will become
>> increasingly important to support properly.
>
> I'm not convinced that SELinux is something that the "masses" deal with 
> today, or that it is something they will be dealing with in the near future.
>
> IMO, Chef has a long ways to go with regards to better supporting other OS 
> platforms, even just other versions of Linux that are commonly used in the 
> business community (e.g., RHEL/CentOS).  Ideally, we would have both better 
> support for other platforms AND support for SELinux, but in reality we have 
> to face the facts that there will always be limits to the available 
> resources.
>
> Of course, the core code supports multiple platforms fine, but one of the 
> biggest advantages that you're getting with Chef is the community 
> cookbooks, and that's also their Achilles Heel with regards to support for 
> platforms other than Ubuntu.  That said, this kind of thing is entirely 
> expected when you're talking about such a young product from such a young 
> company, especially one that has such strong ties to the open source 
> community.  Given time, this problem would tend to largely resolve itself 
> as the company grows, the customer list grows, and the community grows.
>

We've mostly not found it too bad - maybe the cookbooks we're using
are pretty mainstream. The biggest pain we've had recently is the
changes in 0.10.4 (I think) which separated out all the RedHat clones
- we've a mix of RedHat and Oracle Enterprise Linux and having to pick
through cookbooks to find the multiple if/case statements which check
for redhat/fedora/scientific/centos and add in
"enterpriseenterpriselinux" is pretty dull; some refactoring to have
ohai report some kind of platform "flavour" would be helpful.

-- 
Alex Kiernan