[chef] Re: Re: organizing cookbooks, and individual projects

[Jay Pipes < >]

On 12/02/2012 07:10 PM, Jesse Nelson wrote:
> We moved to cookbook per repo and use berkshelf to describe the cookbooks 
> and versions a project requires. Initially we used sub modules but that 
> ended up being not exactly the right solution when cookbooks are being 
> updated often across a larger team. 

Yeah, we currently use git submodules for all cookbooks that we need to
make changes to and put each of the cookbooks in a separate git
repository, but I agree that it can be cumbersome to manage SHA1s of
individual cookbook in the git submodules (and remembering to update the
.gitmodules stuff when you make changes!).

That said, though, I prefer to use Git for source-control and
version-related things, and not "yet another dependency-tracking library
tool". It's not that I don't see value in things like Spiceweasel,
Librarian or Berkshelf (the last of which I have not yet tried -- need
to find time to research and test it out!).

I just think that using Git submodules is a good way of separating the
source-control/versioning aspects of the configuration management from
the configuration itself. As for dependencies between things, packages
for OS distributions were developed for this exact thing, and I don't
think it's useful to have another tool tracking dependencies when OS
packages exist to provide (and have a long history of supporting)
dependency tracking.

Best,
-jay