[chef] Passing responses back to Chef?

[Brad Knowles < >]

Folks,

Okay, so I have to be missing something really basic and easy, only I can't 
figure out what it is.  I was hoping someone here might be able to clue me in.


We're using a modified version of the mysql cookbook, and trying to detect 
which version of the MySQL Engine that the user wants to install, and turn 
that into a full version string that could be passed to the package manager 
via the package resource.

I know how to access the desired engine version (major.minor.patch), and I 
figured out a way to determine what the full version string is of the package 
that might match -- e.g., "5.1.70" might translate to 
"5.1.70-0ubuntu0.10.04.1".

What I can't figure out is how to pass that full version string information 
back to Chef.  Setting a shell environment variable doesn't help, because the 
environment of the parent process isn't affected by the child process(es), as 
explained at <http://docs.opscode.com/essentials_environment_variables.html>:

        From a shell, the source command can be used to reload a given
        initialization file; however, since child processes do not affect
        their parent’s environment, using a script or execute resource to
        run source from inside a recipe will have no effect on the
        environment for the chef-client

It also doesn't help to put that information into a file that could be 
"sourced" from Chef, because you'd have to go through a bash resource as a 
child process, as explained at 
<http://docs.opscode.com/resource_execute.html>, because this would get done 
as a child process:

        Instead, use the script resource or one of the script-based resources
        (bash, csh, perl, python, or ruby). For example:

                bash "foo" do
                        code "source /tmp/foo.sh"
                end


So, how else do you get a child process to pass information back to Chef in a 
useful manner?

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>