[chef] Re: MySQL and PostgreSQL cookbooks, RubyGems and You!

[Paul Graydon < >]

On 07/12/2012 08:14 AM, Joshua Timberman wrote:
> Hey Chefs!
>
> I have a topic I'd like to discuss with the community, with regard to
> behavior in the "mysql" and "postgresql" (and related, the "database")
> cookbooks we publish. First, a couple questions about your
> expectations of these cookbooks (whether you use them or not):
>
> 1. Do you expect that the "client" recipe for mysql/postgresql will
> install Ruby libraries?
> 2. If so, do you expect that because you want to use them within the
> same Chef run? Or because you want to use them with your
> application(s)?
>
> Thoughts? We'd love to hear your feedback here or on the ticket.
My predominant thought is: KISS.

The simpler the recipes, the more useful they become for general use.  
The only thing I have ruby installed on our servers for is Chef. I gain 
no benefits (currently?) from having the Ruby MySQL clients installed.  
Same would go for Python I'd hazard a guess. I'd rather such decisions 
were handled independently, or maybe split it out into individual 
recipes within the cookbook.  The Nagios cookbook gives you a variety of 
options about how Nagios is installed, be it from source or packages 
etc.  Maybe something along those lines would be good?

When I first started using Chef I focussed around grabbing cookbooks out 
of the central repository and trying to use them on our servers but 
after finding myself spending a whole heap of time fighting with 
dependencies for things that I didn't need (and battling CentOS 5&6 
quirks), I ultimately gave up and just wrote my own from scratch that 
are entirely focused around our use case.  The cookbooks have mostly 
provided value as demonstrating the capabilities of Chef and various 
tricks you can use.

Paul