[chef] Re: Berkshelf Frustrations, or, Am I Just Doing It Wrong?

[Brian Akins < >]

The .lock file doesn't do anything, AFAIK.

What we do (or are moving towards) is never use roles and environments
as you can't version them.  We use wrapper cookbooks per project that
use cookbook dependencies (with x.y.z versions) in metdata.rb and set
node attributes and/or call LWRPs.  We can then roll out new versions
of the wrapper cookbook incrementally. And we can roll them back
incrementally as well. We set an explicit version in node's run list
and have a little bit of tooling to make changing them in a "one, few,
many, all" manner easier.

It can be a pain, but we can look at a given run list and know exactly
what version of cookbooks and attributes that "contains."

--Brian