[chef] Re: Passing responses back to Chef?

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Aug 6, 2013, at 11:32 PM, Brad Knowles 
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 wrote:

> Okay, I created CHEF-4442 to cover this issue.  If anyone has any questions 
> regarding the details of the matter and any improvements that I could make 
> to the ticket to be more useful, please let me know.

At this point, I'm pretty much stumped.

I discovered that I can't send a notify from a ruby_block to a package 
resource -- that just generates an error.  However, I can have the package 
resource subscribe to the ruby_block, and get notifications that way.  But 
isn't a "subscribe" supposed to just be the opposite of a "notify"?  How can 
it work one way but not the other?


Now I seem to be running into problems about when things are compiled versus 
when they are run.  When the package resource is compiled, the 
variable/attribute I want to use to set the version to be installed does not 
yet exist, and even if it did exist, it would not yet contain the information 
I want to use.  So, it seems that a particular code path is chosen and 
hard-wired based on the information that is available at compile-time, and 
the other code paths are just thrown away.

By the time the version information is available to me through the 
ruby_block, and the package resource gets the notification, it doesn't matter 
because of that hard-wired code path.


I've tried the options shown at 
<http://docs.opscode.com/resource_common.html#run-from-resource-collection> 
to control when things are executed (like, forcing the ruby_block to be 
executed as early as possible, or forcing the package resource to have a 
":delayed" execution), but because everything in the compile phase is done 
before any part of the execution phase, this still doesn't fix the problem.


Thanks to Matt Ray, I did learn how to use mixlib-shellout to have Chef call 
a program and get output back from it, which it could then use elsewhere in 
the recipe.  Unfortunately, that doesn't help me if I can't get that 
information into a package resource to actually install that particular 
version of the software.

Or should I just skip the package resource and install that version of that 
software inside of my own ruby_block?

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