[chef] Excessive dependency chaining?

[Morgan Blackthorne < >]

I'm only using a handful of cookbooks directly, but my berkshelf list is large. Pulling in Apache2 and Nginx adds in a lot of dependencies, one of which is perl, and one of the Java cookbooks ends up pulling in Gnome and X-windows. One of the chef cookbooks (chef-client?) pulls in Windows. These are all headless Linux instances without X installed (and I'd like to keep it that way, heh).

When the run list is compiled and the cookbooks are sent to the client, they end up transferring a lot of cookbooks that never end up actually getting used. And if I touch any of the higher level cookbooks (like the one for my org that configures some things via LWRPs and overrides some cookbook resources), berkshelf then has to parse the list of all those dependencies as well just to upload my local cookbook. I even tried using a group to filter things down but dependencies are resolved even when using groups. Berks also seems to re-upload every cookbook even if the version number hasn't changed, which is odd to me. (Fixing that would minimize at least some of the annoyance factor of how long "berks upload" takes.)

Is this just a situation where "deal with it" is the most practical advice, or is there a way to break some of these dependencies that I know aren't going to be reached in my use case (like the gnome and windows cookbooks...)?

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