[chef] postfix wrapper problem

[David Morton < >]

The postfix cookbook has all of its examples using roles to set various 
attributes before running.   I've seen a lot of push back on roles, and 
was trying to make a wrapper cookbook, but there's a gotcha in attribute 
loading order.

https://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Attributes+Cookbook says:

 "When Chef loads cookbook attribute files, it does so in alphabetical 
order for all the cookbooks. If you need to ensure that one attribute 
file is loaded before another (for example, if your Apache cookbook 
attributes requires that the Rails cookbook attributes are available 
first) you can use the include_attribute method"

My wrapper cookbook starts with a "w" so the postfix cookbook comes 
first.   I can't add include_attribute to the postfix cookbook without 
forking it, and adding include_attribute "postfix" in my own attributes 
file after I set some defaults, doesn't work, because as I look at the 
code for include_attribute, it explicitly ignores files it has already 
loaded.


The problem is, the postfix attribute file does some conditional loading:

if node['postfix']['main']['smtp_sasl_auth_enable'] == 'yes'
  default['postfix']['sasl_password_file'] = 
"#{node['postfix']['conf_dir']}/sasl_passwd"
  default['postfix']['main']['smtp_sasl_password_maps'] = 
"hash:#{node['postfix']['sasl_password_file']}"
  default['postfix']['main']['smtp_sasl_security_options'] = 'noanonymous'
  default['postfix']['sasl']['smtp_sasl_user_name'] = ''
  default['postfix']['sasl']['smtp_sasl_passwd'] = ''
  default['postfix']['main']['relayhost'] = ''
end


If I don't have that node attribute set first, those extra attributes 
don't get set, and the postfix::sasl_auth file breaks because of nil 
values.  (as a side note, I think if you include postfix::sasl_auth 
without setting 'smtp_sasl_auth_enable', you are going to hit those same 
nil errors... maybe this is a bug in the postfix cookbook?)

Nothing I can do in a cookbook or recipe can fix that because the 
attributes from the postfix cookbook have already been loaded and cannot 
be reloaded.

so...  help?  where can I set 
node['postfix']['main']['smtp_sasl_auth_enable']   before the postfix 
attribute file is loaded?

workaround: I guess I set all those attributes in my own attributes file?

--
David Morton