[chef] Re: Re: Cookbook reusability

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Mar 5, 2012, at 9:25 AM, Wes Morgan wrote:

> So this could be a layer on top of GitHub (and we'd need to make the 
> knife-GitHub integration more official), or it could be a vastly-improved 
> community.opscode.com, or something else entirely. But right now there is 
> just too much friction between "I've made this cookbook more general" and 
> "this is now the primary version of this cookbook."

As Opscode splits their cookbooks into individual repos, they will be able to 
more easily do this.  So long as everyone does a proper fork of the project 
on github, the branches should all remain visible and accessible, and then 
it's up to the folks who run the repo as to whose changes they actually 
choose to incorporate.

I think the Cookbooks project on github is effectively already doing this 
kind of thing for the various repos they track.


IMO, the real trick is getting everyone to properly fork and track their 
projects, and then getting people who are willing and able to apply the 
generalizations to the site-specific cookbooks that are released.

I like Nikolay's idea, but I'm not a real programmer and I don't apply the 
methods he describes.  It would be up to someone else to come along and take 
whatever I've rigged together with spit, bailing wire, chewing gum, and a 
whole lot of prayer, and then turn that into something more general and 
useful.

For example, when people hear that I've written a cookbook for the Zerigo 
dynamic DNS service, they might be interested to see what I've got -- that 
is, until they actually do see it, and realize just how horrible it really 
is.  But, it actually works for us, which is something that I can't say for 
the other Zerigo cookbook we found.  And what I really care about is that 
something works, not how pretty it is.

-- 
Brad Knowles 
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SAGE Level IV, Chef Level 0.0.1