[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Chef 11.8 Dependency Question

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Friday, November 1, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Mike wrote:

The problem arises when the plugin is targeted towards a specific Chef version(s), and that's currently the only way to constrain things. However, if you're constraining on a specific X.Y.Z version of Chef, you should be ok. It's where 11.8.0 introduces new dependencies that were not previously there - that's where we're all getting stuck.

That’s the trigger that exposes the issue, but there are a number of ways that this could happen. Chef depends on a handful of gems with C extensions, and if any of these were to release a new version that matched Chef’s version constraints, then rubygems would attempt to upgrade them when installing anything that depends on Chef. To borrow (and butcher) a phrase from Allspaw, both conditions are necessary and only jointly sufficient for this problem to occur.

It’s also pretty troubling that you could unknowingly get upgraded to a newer version of chef (including a major version update) when you only wanted to install a test framework.

 

-M

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Daniel DeLeo