[chef] the node[:platform?] attribute in chef 10.12.0

[Bryan Berry < >]

can any chef devs tell me what the purpose is of the node[:platform?] attribute is?

I have just started seeing it after upgrading from 0.10.8 to 10.12.0. The strange part is that my RHEL 6.2 boxes report "ubuntu" for that value if I have the PHP cookbook in my run_list https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/php . w/out the PHP cookbook in the run_list, platform? holds the array [ "redhat", "fedora", "centos" ]

Bizarre!

I have dug into the PHP cookbook and its dependencies and cannot find any statement that equates to  `node[:platform?] = "ubuntu" `, whether for the default, normal, or override attributes. 

I also have dug into the chef code and haven't found the platform? method that this attribute corresponds to. 

Can anyone shed some light on this?