[chef] Re: Resource attribute environment

[Lamont Granquist < >]

On 2/16/15 2:17 AM, Gordon Franke wrote:
> Hello,
>
> i have found several variants of the environment attribute.
>
> environment "PATH" => "/my/path/to/bin:#{ENV["PATH"]}"
> environment ({'HOME' => '/home/myhome'})
> environment  { 'VAR' => 'whatever' }
>
> What is the correct one and what is the difference?
>
>
> Best Regards
> Gordon
Fairly certain the last one is incorrect, and the ruby parser interprets 
`environment { whatever }` to mean that you're passing a block rather 
than a hash, and when it sees hashrockets (=>) in what it thinks is a 
block it'll throw a syntax error at you.  This is a limitation of the 
ruby language because `{}` can be ambiguous and mean either a hash or a 
block.

I think these forms all work:

environment "foo" => "bar", "fizz" => "buzz"
environment( "foo" => "bar", "fizz" => "buzz" )
environment( { "foo" => "bar", "fizz" => "buzz" } )

The choice between them comes down to style.  I actually prefer the last 
one in this specific case because its makes it the easiest to see that 
it has to parse correctly, and is easiest on my aged braincells.  I 
think you'll be forced into that case if you want to pass the empty hash 
as well, and I don't like rules with additional special cases:

environment   # this is the accessor, does not set
environment() # this is the accessor, does not set
environment {} # passes a block
environment({}) # this correctly passes an empty hash