[chef] ark resource

[Maven User < >]

Hi all - 

I'm starting to look at ark and liked what I saw - I'm currently working on bootstrapping developer machines with the tools we need here (starting simple with maven and java).

I _thought_ I wanted to use :puts, but for some reason, chef keeps trying to write into /var/chef (which I don't want it to - everything for a dev machine needs to stay within the user's home dir for this experiment).

I'm generating the "solo.rb" on the fly like this:

file_cache_path "/home/$USER/.chef/cache"
cookbook_path "/home/$USER/chef-repo/cookbooks"

What am I missing?  Here is the error:

[2012-08-20T14:36:09-04:00] ERROR: remote_file[/home/<user>/.chef/cache/maven.tar.gz] (dynamically defined) has had an error
[2012-08-20T14:36:09-04:00] ERROR: ark[maven] (maven::default line 11) has had an error
[2012-08-20T14:36:09-04:00] ERROR: ark[maven] (/home/<user>/chef-repo/cookbooks/maven/recipes/default.rb:11:in `from_file') had an error:
ark[maven] (maven::default line 11) had an error: Errno::EACCES: remote_file[/home/<user>/.chef/cache/maven.tar.gz] (dynamically defined) had an error: Errno::EACCES: Permission denied - /var/chef

I can see that the maven gzip has come down properly, but I don't understand why anything is looking at /var/chef for any reason....