[chef] Upcoming Chef Windows Changes: Know Your Rights!

[John Keiser < >]

Hi everyone,

We're planning some new Windows attributes in the next release of Chef to take advantage of the rich permissions system Windows offers, and wanted to get your feedback.  Specifically, we plan to add the ability to manipulate full Windows-style ACLs on file and directory resources, and add the full range of inheritance and permission granularity we're used to having on Windows.

The summary:

• A new rights attribute, which lets you give (or deny) rights to Windows users or group and set attributes like inheritance.
  
• A new inherits attribute, which lets you turn off a file or directory inheriting permissions from its parents
  
• Modified the owner and group attributes, which now allow the full range of Windows users and groups (not just Unix ones)
  

The code is sitting in the chef repository, so you can try it out.

We'd like your thoughts: what we might have missed, what you'd like to work different, other use cases that you'd like to cover on Windows, and whether this is worthwhile to you at all :)  Please take a gander at the feature proposal and let us know your thoughts!

Thanks,

--John Keiser

Opscode