[chef] Re: Re: Versioning roles (was: on the general usage of chef)

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Elvin Abordo wrote:

Thanks for breaking this discussion out. I think i would've missed it if it wasn't broke out. 

I like the idea personally. Without having gone through the demoware, i have a question. 

Since you state that roles and environments would get replaced in the proposed model, how would attribute precedence be handled?  I rely on the fact that chef_environments have the highest override attribute precendence (other than force_override and automatic attributes) so that i can override an attribute when needed and not have to worry about another role or a recipe setting a default attribute somewhere. 

Caveat again that nothing has actually been built yet (the demo ware could make for a convincing screencast, but most commands actually just cat a file). Probably more interesting are the documents in that repo’s docs/ dir.

The way I imagine attributes working is similar to how roles are expanded now, where the “outermost” role wins over roles nested inside of it. Any attributes you set explicitly in a policy file would be the “outermost-est” and win over anything in a role. You could also use attribute-only roles to set attributes across multiple policies or evaluate arbitrary ruby code during policy file evaluation to set attributes.

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Daniel DeLeo