[Blueprint servercloud-q-chef] Getting Chef Back Into Ubuntu

[Bryan McLellan]

Blueprint changed by Bryan McLellan:

Whiteboard changed:
  Discussion Topics:
  
  What issues lead to the packages being removed from precise?
+  - Fast Chef development cycle over the last two years made current stable branch 0.10.x while precise still had 0.8.16.
+  - solr package became out of date and broken, which blocked chef-solr [1]
  How do we ensure that these don't re-occur to ensure the long term viability of chef as part of Ubuntu?
-  - Maintaining chef in Debian will help with this.
-  - Recommending users of Ubuntu and Debian to use the packages (instead of gem installing) will also help.
+  - Maintaining chef in Debian will help with this.
+    a) The debian pkg-ruby-extras team can use help, especially with the current transition
+  - rails3 support in debian [2] for Chef 11
+  - Recommending users of Ubuntu and Debian to use the packages (instead of gem installing) will also help.
+    a) The differing release paradigm makes this problematic. With a goal of stability, debian/ubuntu follow a waterfall software development model of heavy testing and then a stable release with minor bug and security fixes as needed. On the contrary, Chef is under continuous development and improvement. The version of Chef in an LTS release will be severely out of date in a year. Providing individual bug patches (diffs) to this package would alone be very resource intensive, but major features will be missing which provides a large documentation issue. "use the 'foobarblah' resource, except if you're on Ubuntu LTS, then do it this way," cannot be achieved across all our documentation, let alone the blogs and howto's of the internet. The latter will be improved when we provide versioned documentation. Under the Ubuntu release model, this will necessitate that the user upgrade their distribution whenever they want the latest version of Chef, which is problematic for people running services in a production environment.
+    b) Debian packages are the recommended installation method for Debian/Ubuntu, but using the Opscode apt repository due to the above issue.
+    c) The recommended installation method in the future will be our full-stack installer, to provide a stable version of ruby (missing in most distributions, probably due to Ruby's release paradigm) alongside the latest version of Chef in the simplest installation method possible. "How software should be installed" is a matter of personal preference for many, and Opscode aims to continue supporting distribution level and gem packaging for those who prefer it.
+ 
+ [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=602697
+ [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=620253

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Getting Chef Back Into Ubuntu
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-q-chef