Merge custom code into official opscode cookbook?

[patcon]

Just wondering how you'd feel about this. Was looking at your solr recipe, and would love to make use of it, but I'm somewhat reluctant to jump in without trying to merge divergent efforts first :)

https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/jetty

(Still haven't had time to dive into the guts of the cookbook, so apologies if the rational is something obvious.)

[theozaurus]

The Opscode cookbook focuses on using the package management system to manage the install, I've found that for Ubuntu at least the .deb is very out of date, and the default configuration did not play nice with the way I wanted to deploy Solr.

Ideally we would get the packages for each distro updated and maintained then their would be no need for this cookbook.

[patcon]

It's a pretty common pattern with cookbook with have an install_method attribute that can be used to include recipes likes pear.rb or package.rb or source.rb:
https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/php/blob/master/recipes/default.rb#L22

I'm sure they're be willing to accept a PR if we made sure it was general enough. Would that be something you'd be interested in working toward?

[theozaurus]

The idea of this cookbook is to make it very easy to install apps by just squeezing a .war into the relevant directory. It's going to create a lot of maintenance to manipulate the package managed installs into a consistent setup as every distro has a different preference for the way it is done. I'm not sure it adds a lot of value by allowing both types of install, and merging the two seems like you are making it more brittle because of the extra dependency on packages completely out of our control.

However, I'd love to be proved wrong on this. A good place to start could be to create a standard provider that is for installing wars, regardless of the server type (Jetty, Tomcat...), and get this used consistently by all the cookbooks that require services to be installed in this way. I only have experience of Solr, what others services have you seen that could take advantage of this?

[patcon]

Hm. I'll need to look a bit deeper. Working on getting the tomcat and percona cookbooks working first, as they're lower in my stack :)

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm a little crunched for time, so will likely spend my time helping to decouple the solr cookbook from any particular version of tomcat or jetty. I don't think I'm going to have time to submit pull requests here, so feel free to close (unless you want to leave it open for someone else)

(war provider sounds interesting though, so I'll try to keep it in mind :) )

[patcon]

I thought I'd seen provider like this around, and turns out there's one in the java cookbook. Could this work, or could it be generalized to work?
https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/java#resourcesproviders