[chef] Chefconf Hackday results

["Eric G. Wolfe" < >]

So last week, Fletcher Nichol and myself, took on the task of adding 
attribute sanity tests, and foodcritic linting, to a simple cookbook.  
Many others joined us for some Beer-Driven Development throughout the 
week, almost too many to name (big thanks to Matthew Sauve-Frankel).  We 
also integrated this with Travis CI for shits 'n' giggles.  I received 
some feedback ranging on our testing efforts from "that sounds stupid" 
to "that looks badass".

Both of us have some community cookbooks that take upwards of 30 minutes 
to converge.  So this was a bit of a proof of concept, and an exercise 
to provide reference documentation for testing cookbooks.  Our main goal 
was to have a way of testing inputs (attributes) as a cookbook ships.  
As a cookbook maintainer, I have no way of knowing what attributes 
someone may override without loading external roles.  The way I see it, 
the least I could do is make sure what does ship in one of my cookbooks 
is somewhat sane.

I opened a JIRA ticket [COOK-1298] intending to use NTP as a reference 
cookbook for platform edge-case testing.  It seemed like a good hello 
world example to test this idea out.  So, not actually sure if I'll pull 
request this or not.  I guess I am looking for validation from others on 
the mailing list that this idea is not, in fact, stupid.

I have squashed the commits in the following tree, to hide any drunken 
commit messages which may, or may not, have occurred at Chefconf.  Check 
it out, and let me know what you think.  The TESTING.md is meant to 
serve as a HOWTO document for testing cookbook inputs as we have done here.
https://github.com/atomic-penguin/ntp/tree/COOK-1298

--
Eric G. Wolfe
Senior Linux Administrator,
IT Infrastructure Systems
--------------------------------------
Marshall University Computing Services
Drinko Library 428-K
One John Marshall Dr.
Huntington, WV 25755
Phone: 304.942.3970
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