[chef] application deployments

[JayP < >]

Hi,

We just started using chef for our application deployments which are rpms so 
at
the moment we are using the package resource to handle this installation.  I
was directed to the application cookbook
(https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/application) but it seems this cookbook
doesn't support rpm's and also requires the application to be pulled from a
repository.  Are there plans to update the application cookbook to support 
rpms
or any other suggestions?  

In addition I wanted to get some suggestions on how best to manage the version
number of the application rpm being deployed into qa/staging/production.  
Since
we have a separate continuous integration pipeline for our infrastructure code
(cookbooks) and the rev'ing of the cookbook in the production.json file is
automated through our CI system I would rather not store the application rpm
version in the environment files.  I was thinking of storing this in the
application role and namespace it like so ['app']['version']['production'] =
"1.0".  Any thoughts around this or suggested approaches?

Thanks,
Jay