[chef] lwrp's and libraries broken kung-foo

[andi abes < >]

We recently updated to open chef  10.6 (from 9.8) and my lwrp broke a little.

The goal of the LWRP is to auto discover the presence of utilities on the system, and use the appropriate one. 

The way it was rigged as:

* A library file contains a general purpose class which is to be extended by the utility specific classes

 * The general class implements self.inherited(subclass), and records in a class variable all the extending classes (an array)

 * The provider in its load_current_resource iterates over the collection of available libraries, until one reports it can operate on this system.

This worked nicely in .9.8, but broke in .10.6.  Poking at chef code a bit, it seems that the reason for that is the switch in run_context.rb load_libraries to using Kernel.load() rather than require. (I think). This seems to prevent any common context between the different libraries and providers (??)

To put it it code:

in libraries/d_base.rb:

class BASE:

    @@controller_styles = []

    def self.inherited(subclass)      

      @@controller_styles  << subclass

    end

    def self.controller_styles

      @@controller_styles

    end

end

in libraries/d_a.rb:

class ASTYLE < BASE

  def working()

     return test

  end

end

in providers/a.rb:

def load_current_resource  

   BASE.controller_styles.each { |c| 

       break if c.working()

   }

end

A few questions:

) what triggered the switch from 'require' to Kernel.load()? Is it around better isolation of libraries within the same provider, or across providers?

) anyone else hit something similar?

) is there a way of achieving this in 0.10.6 and beyond?

thanks for any pointers.