[chef] Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [RFC] github.com/cookbooks

[Peter Donald < >]

Hi,

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Matt Ray 
<
 >
 wrote:
> I think if we (Opscode) and all other producers of Community cookbooks were
> to tag every uploaded version this would be a moot point but it hasn't
> happened. I'm sure we're open to suggestions for how to enforce this,
> especially in the case where Community cookbooks might not be originating
> from GitHub or even git repos (gasp). Can we somehow make the Community site
> support this without creating yet another place to find cookbooks?

I have been using chef for just over a year, created several
cookbooks, some of which are up on the community site and some which
are not and the community site is never the site I visit when I want
to find a new cookbook. The reason for this?
(1) often the /best/ variants of a particular cookbook are not on the
community site.
(2) often people don't upload the latest cookbook to community site
(3) inspecting the cookbooks is better done on github rather than on
community site. Easy to view code, easy to see how many people
interact with project etc.
(4) We merge in git repositories into our main infrastructure repo
(currently through braid [1], probably soon to be with git subtree
[2])

In my perfect world with rainbows and unicorns, the community site
would become the definitive source of cookbooks. Every cookbook would
be stored in some public source code repository that allows you to do
the dedicated source code browsing/reviewing/inspecting. The community
site would monitor the source code repository and any time an
appropriate tag is added would auto-release into the community. To
enable this the developer would need to designate a "stable" branch in
their source code repository of choice and whenever a tag is added to
that branch this is identified as an appropriate tag and a release
occurs. The community site also have namespaces so there can be
multiple cookbooks with the same name. The community site would also
stop having these crappy tools to view the source and what not and
instead cross link extensively with the tools like in github. Each
Cookbook page could link to source viewer, the issue tracker, the
project page etc. If we ever have a standardised test infrastructure
we could also upload the test report to the cookbook site.

So the above would allow anyone who wanted to publish a cookbook to
publish it easily. What it doesn't do is often significant enough
motivation to make it THE place to put the cookbooks. I don't know the
best way to do that. Maybe making it possible to generate awesome
documentation (or at least some documentation) - maybe via the chefdoc
style tool I have ranted about in the past. If the community site had
awesome documentation and all the cookbooks I may wat to use it would
suddenly become a lot more interesting.

[1] https://github.com/evilchelu/braid/wiki
[2] 
https://github.com/gitster/git/blob/634392b26275fe5436c0ea131bc89b46476aa4ae/contrib/subtree/git-subtree.txt

-- 
Cheers,

Peter Donald