[chef] application cookbook "annoyances"

[Torben Knerr < >]

Hey guys,

in the process of converting my roles to application cookbooks I encountered some "annoyances" which I don't know how to handle properly yet.

1) some cookbooks rely on roles, e.g. nagios::client or munin::client find their server counterpart using a search for `role:monitoring`

I'm thinking of keeping the roles as "marker roles" which act like tags basically and keep backwards compatibility for cookbooks using role-based searches.

How do you handle this?

2) some cookbooks search for recipes in the runlist, e.g. apt::cacher-client searches for servers with `recipe:apt\:\:cacher-ng`

Now that the only item in my run_list is `my-app-cookbook` and the `apt::cacher-ng` is `include_recipe`d it can not be found anymore via that search.

How do you handle such cases? 

I believe there are a lot more recipes using these kinds of searches which would break when following the application cookbook pattern.

I could live with "marker roles" to make these cookbooks happy, but for the cookbook searches I have no clue. 

Is it true that with Chef 11 `include_recipe`d recipes show up in the expanded run_list? Can you search for them using `recipe:apt\:\:cacher-ng` for example?

Cheers,

Torben