[chef] chef-client cookbook changes coming

[Joshua Timberman < >]

Ohai Chefs,

I wanted to let you all know about some changes coming to Opscode's 
chef-client cookbook. There are important notes here regarding backwards 
compatibility.

# TL;DR:

We recommend that you pin your use of the chef-client cookbook to the 
released 2.2.4 version. The master branch will get changes described below, 
which may break compatibility. We want to minimize this, but we can't predict 
everyone's use of this cookbook.

Plan accordingly :).

# Background

The chef-client cookbook has existed for a long time. Originally, it was used 
to configure /etc/chef/client.rb and a chef-client daemon service with 
chef-solo, before we had knife bootstrap and friends. The config recipe may 
be less necessary with knife bootstrap, but the service management recipe is 
important because our Omnibus package doesn't install a service.

Given its age and scope over time, the cookbook has undergone a number of 
changes, particularly adding support for other platforms in the service 
management recipes. Overall it works, but there are changes that require a 
fair amount of refactoring. This is all collected under a task ticket:

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/COOK-2855

Some of the more important foundational changes are described below.

# Config Recipe

Work tracked in this ticket:

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/COOK-2856

This adds a new sub-attribute, node['chef_client']['config']. In the 
client.rb.erb, we walk through this hash of options and their values, and 
write out the /etc/chef/client.rb. The commit referenced in the ticket has an 
initial implementation.

We plan to also implement a "conf.d" style of configuration inclusion via 
COOK-2858.

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/COOK-2858

This will allow users to drop off any arbitrary additional configuration for 
/etc/chef/client.rb similar to other tools that do "configuration includes."

# Service Recipes

Via COOK-2319

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/COOK-2319

We've split up the "service" recipe into multiple recipes, one for each 
"service type" (init, runit, smf, etc). Now the init_style attribute will 
include the appropriate recipe. Or, you can opt to just include the service 
recipe you want on the appropriate nodes. 

This ticket also covers some use cases of running chef-client on a node that 
is also the chef-server. 

# Call for Testing

We need your help testing. As I mentioned, we can't imagine every use case 
here. While we can't workaround all changes, we do want to make the next 
version as widely useful as possible.

Please help test. Normally we don't recommend the master branch for cookbooks 
but obviously the released version won't have these changes yet.

# Compatibility

We've tried to make everything backwards compatible as much as possible. 
However, this is definitely one of those "have to break some eggs to make an 
omlette" topics. We feel that the benefits outweight the negatives here, 
especially for those who want more flexibility out of this cookbook. This 
also builds directly on work we're doing internally, so we will use this too 
:-).

The target Chef version for this cookbook is Chef 11. After scanning through 
COOK, I didn't see any obvious show stopping bugs for the current version on 
Chef 10, so 2.2.4 should work for most folks.

Cheers,
Joshua