[chef] COOK Development Focus

[Joshua Timberman < >]

Ohai,

In the near term, Opscode will focus our efforts related to our cookbooks 
(COOK project) on major, critical, or blocker bug fixes, resolving foodcritic 
"correctness" issues, and adding test coverage via test-kitchen 1.0. The 
purpose is to provide a higher standard of quality for cookbooks. As such, we 
may significantly refactor a number of cookbooks, including their recipes and 
resources.

Just so we're on the same page, major, critical, and blocker bugs roughly fit 
this profile:

These bugs cause recipes or resources for the *default use case* of the 
cookbook to cause an exception when running on platforms explicitly supported 
(either in metadata, "supports" or in the README). The severity will depend 
on what the workaround is for the issue (if any), and whether the bug is 
present in the latest "released" (on the Community site) version of the 
cookbook.

We will consider new features and improvements to cookbooks again at some 
point in the future.

The master branch of cookbooks is not necessarily fully tested *at this 
time*. One of our goals is to get all cookbooks supported with test-kitchen 
and running in our CI system, so we can know if the "master" branch is 
release-worthy.

New features and improvements such as adding support for platforms that 
Opscode does not primarily support, or adding command-line options or 
attributes for "flexibility" are not in scope for the near term; meaning we 
won't review those in code review, nor work on development unless they're 
directly part of a refactor. This is not permenant, but we want to be clear 
in case you're wondering why we haven't reviewed a ticket or pull request yet.

If you'd like to help, that's awesome! You can help best in one of these ways:

* Search for open/in-progress/reopened tickets in COOK that are "major," 
"critical," or "blocker" severity and follow-up, ensure contributors (if any) 
have a CLA, or fix the bug(s). Use this handy search[0].

* Help maintain a cookbook! Contact me directly about the cookbook(s) you're 
interested in helping maintain; you must have signed the CLA already and 
ideally contributed to that cookbook in the past.

* Help add test-kitchen 1.0 support. Since that project is still in active 
development, that means a bit more high-touch involvement, but it's nearly 
ready, and certainly usable. #chef-hacking or the chef-dev list are great 
places to get help.

If you have questions or concerns, please email me directly, 

 

[0]: handy search! 
http://tickets.opscode.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=11797

Thank you!
Joshua Timberman, Opscode, Inc.
@jtimberman