[chef] Re: Understanding the Chef philosophy

[Mike < >]

Hi Kevin,

The yum cookbook located on the Community Site http://ckbk.it/yum has
a recipe named `yum::epel` - so including that recipe in your roles
prior to installing other packages would ensure that the correct EPEL
repo is created.

In the past, EPEL have broken quite a few of their installation rpms
and this has become the best way to maintain the code.

In practice for your problem of remi-collect, I suspect that adding
the `yum::epel` recipe to your run_list prior to installing
remi-colelct will work, as the epel-release*.rpm is inside the EPEL
repository - installing the package that depends on this should pull
down the epel-release package as a dependency.

Best,
-Mike

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 9:19 PM, Kevin Keane (subscriptions)
<
 >
 wrote:
> I'm a (relative) beginner with Chef. One of the things I've been struggling
> with is understanding how to use community cookbooks, and whether there is
> an underlying philosophy behind how to use it. At first glance, it seems to
> me that many cookbooks seem to reinvent the wheel. Obviously there are many
> smart minds at work here, so there probably is a fundamental reason that I'm
> just not getting.
>
>
>
> Case in point - and something I just ran into: the yum cookbook to manage
> repositories.
>
>
>
> This cookbook creates .repo files; as far as I can tell, it does not support
> downloading epel-release*.rpm and installing that RPM.
>
>
>
> The reason this tripped me up was that I tried to install the remi-collet
> repository (by RPM), which depends on the EPEL *RPM*.
>
>
>
> In other cases, cookbooks put files into non-standard files or directory
> structures (which tends to break SELinux and native tools; SELinux is an
> absolute must-have for me).
>
>
>
> Sure, this particular example is easy to solve.
>
>
>
> But I hope to better understand the underlying idea so I can better leverage
> all the community cookbooks without giving up on the features of the
> platform.
>
>