You may have noticed over the last few weeks that we’ve been hard at work in the Cookbook Engineering Team prepping for the release of Chef 13. One of our Chef 13 goals for community cookbooks is the remove the dependency on the compat_resource cookbook. Compat_resource back ports many core chef-client resources from newer Chef releases, but it was originally conceived to backport the custom resource functionality to Chef 12.1 - 12.4. We’ve depended on compat_resource in a large number of cookbooks as we migrate from HWRP/LWRPs to custom resources. Unfortunately compat_resource has introduced its own set of issues and we’ve decided not to continue depending on it for custom resource compatibility. Chef 12.5 was introduced in October of 2015, which we believe has given users a long period of time to upgrade to at least that release. Going forward when using custom resources in cookbooks we’ll depend on Chef 12.5 or later. As usual we strongly recommend upgrading to a recent Chef release to utilize new functionality and pull in the latest bug fixes.
-Tim