[chef] Re: chef-client cookbook and log rotation

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Dec 18, 2012, at 3:57 PM, Kirill Timofeev 
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 wrote:

> I cloned chef-client cookbook from 
> https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/chef-client. It looks like this ;
> cookbook doesn't setup logrotate for chef-client. May I ask you if this was 
> done intentionally or this is a bug?

I don't work for Opscode, so I can't give you a definitive answer.

First off, keep in mind that the cookbooks provided via github are not the 
official sources of the cookbooks as far as community is concerned.  That's 
where they do development of the cookbooks, but (unless specified otherwise) 
they only officially support the versions as uploaded to 
<http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks>.

Secondly, the cookbooks they provide are intended to be a starting point, to 
give you ideas of how things could be done.  They are not generally intended 
to be all-encompassing.

Third, my view is that they try fairly hard to be OS-agnostic, and a cookbook 
like logrotate is going to necessarily have to be fairly OS-specific in the 
way it is implemented -- FreeBSD won't necessarily work anything like Ubuntu, 
Ubuntu won't necessarily work anything like Red Hat, none of them will work 
anything remotely like Windows or OS X, etc....

> If this was done intentionally should I just use logrotate cookbook 
> (https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/logrotate) and add logrotate recipe 
> to chef-client with following content?

It's been a while since I looked at that cookbook and how it did things, but 
what you suggest does seem plausible.

> From my point of view it is very reasonable to have logrotate enabled out 
> of the box for chef-client.

There are a lot of platforms that Opscode tries to support, which means that 
there's a lot of stuff they don't try to provide out-of-the-box, if that 
might only be useful on a certain subset of the platforms.  If you want to 
contribute code to implement certain features for certain platforms, I'm sure 
that they'd be happy to look at your pull request, but that doesn't 
necessarily mean that they would necessarily agree to accept it.

I believe it's also a good idea to generally make cookbooks fairly 
independent of each other, in particular when you're talking about 
foundational cookbooks on which everything else might be built.

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>