Re:: Using the wrapper cookbook development method to remove the pager duty contact from the Nagios Cookbook

Hi Drew,

I have reached out to the Nagios cookbook development team - they were
quite helpful, and there is actually a pending patch to rectify (at least
in part) the behavior that I was attempting to remedy with my logic. In
terms of a reliable, fast, and flexible development method though reaching
out to the developers leaves something to be desired.

Can you elaborate on the architectural features of the Nagios cookbook
that lead to me being unable to recompile the ERB?

My thinking is this: if the behavior is undefined and I can’t reliably
determine when I am encountering a cloned resource that cannot be
recompiled, that is a formula for wasting days of development time.

My instinct is to fork the repos I will be working with in the future, and
maintain a topic branch for business logic that I will not be upstreaming.
That way I can upstream and contribute any useful code that I write - I
guess another criticism that strikes me regarding the wrapper cookbook
development method is that it encourages people to gloss over bad logic
rather than fix it and upstream their fix.

I am not a developer by trade, so I imagine there are elements to this
discussion that I haven’t fully weighed. At any rate, thanks for your time
and for sharing your thoughts.

Joe
On 5/18/15, 10:44 PM, "drew@blessing.io" drew@blessing.io wrote:

Joe,

The wrapper cookbook pattern is well worth it, IMO. Your problem seems
related to architecture of the community cookbook and your internal
needs. Maybe it would be helpful to open an issue in the nagios cookbook
issue tracker to see if they can change/add something to help.

Drew

On May 18, 2015, at 9:22 PM, Joseph Hammerman
JHammerman@secondmarket.com wrote:

Thank you for clarifying that Daniel.

This information is definitely making me reconsider the viability of the
wrapper cookbook development method.

Would you happen to know if there is any more up to date information on
this issue than the final comment in CHEF-3694?

Would you (or anyone else on the thread with us) be able to tell me if
there a way to identify which version of the object you are referencing?
It might save me some debug time if I ever encounter a similar issue.

Thanks,
Joe

On 5/18/15, 1:29 PM, "Daniel DeLeo" dan@kallistec.com wrote:

On Monday, May 18, 2015 at 9:25 AM, Joseph Hammerman wrote:

Hi Chef users email distribution list,

An update on this item: if I set load_default_config to false my
template renders correctly. Therefore, I conclude that the observed
behavior is a consequence of Chef¹s resource cloning.

The only change from the pastebin below is that I tried defining and
explicitly passing in the variable that I have manipulated in my
wrapper
logic:

nagios_contactgroups = Nagios.instance.contactgroups

begin
t = resources(:template =>
"#{node['nagios']['config_dir']}/contacts.cfg")
t.source "contacts.cfg.erb"
t.cookbook "sm-nagios"
t.variables(:nagios_contactgroups => Nagios.instance.contactgroups)
#rescue Chef::Exceptions::ResourceNotFound

Chef::Log.warn "could not find template

#{node['nagios']['config_dir']/contacts.cfg to modify"
End

Can anyone shed light on why the cloned resource is superseding my
attempt to open back up the object and re-render it?
The problem with the clone behavior (well, one of them) is that you end
up with two resources of the same type+name, but Chef elsewhere treats
type+name as a unique id for a resource in the collection. Therefore,
anything that looks up a resource by name+type (like the resources
method) is going to have undefined behavior when resources have been
cloned.

--
Daniel DeLeo


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