General discussion about Chef

[chef] Conditional dependencies


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Matt Whiteley < >
  • To:
  • Subject: [chef] Conditional dependencies
  • Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2013 08:46:44 -0700
I've been searching the mailing lists and JIRA etc. for discussion related to this issue. What I have found so far seems to cover a few different use cases.

cookbook metadata should include maintainer_repository

The depends cookbook DSL should take an optional platform_family argument

Implement cookbook metadata "suggests" and "recommends"

Enforce / Implement platform "supports" in cookbook metadata

The problem that we are having occurs when a mandatory cookbook's dependencies change based on attributes. As others have described, this can cause issues of slowness or confusion when cookbooks unsupported on the client system are required. As an example, I would like to develop a cookbook that will require the MySQL or PostgreSQL cookbooks but can also ignore this dependency with an unset db_type attribute.

I'm not convinced that the "suggests" and "recommends" qualifiers would satisfy this use case. It seems more like the virtual package concept (http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html#s-virtual), which the "provides" metadata support was presumably intended for.

I didn't want to hack together something for our issue, but I'm happy to work on this if a path forward can be agreed on. I'm on irc as well as mattw.

thanks,
--
Matt Whiteley < " target="_blank"> >


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