i dont think anyone should use definition, iirc a debate where we were discussing deprecating them (or at least not advocating them), as steve pointed out, they are more like macro expansion, but since chef run is dual phases, macro expansion has subtle consequences. they pretty much blocks building higher abstraction on top of them.LWRPs are generally going to be the first tool to reach for. But if you're trying to manage a single file like /etc/sudoers, /etc/aliases, /etc/sysconfig/iptables, /etc/sysctl.conf, /etc/sshd/known_hosts, etc across multiple recipes then a definition can be useful to collect all the information across all the cookbooks and manage the file with a single resource (and manage the whole file as a template and avoid the need for multiple edit-in-place resources to manage it). Trying to do that with an LWRP gets annoying, particularly when you want the resource to get managed sooner rather than later, using a definition means you can gather all the information compile-time and then manage the resource at the point in the resource collection where the first definition is invoked. Then later recipes can rely on the resource having been set already (sysctls are set, firewall rules in place, etc). With an LWRP approach you typically wind up with this problem of wanting a default recipe that users must put at the right spot in their run_lists in order to mange the resource and the LWRP then sends a notification to that resource and that's a symptom that you're not doing it right.
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