[collectd] Chef recpie for collectd (was: http://collectd.org/temp/ContactMe.chef)

[Florian Forster]

Hi Miah,

thanks for getting in touch.

On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 02:08:21PM -0800, Miah Johnson wrote:
> I'm the author of a chef cookbook that manages collectd. I'm not sure
> if my cookbook is the source of your woes but I figured I'd drop you
> an email.

It looks like you're the author of `recipes/_install_from_source.rb` or
have rewritten substantial parts of it. I have never used Chef, so
please bear with me if I ask dumb^H^H^H^Huninformed questions ;)

The problem is that the cookbook is simply downloading the source too
often. Generally, that shouldn't be requried: We publish checksums in
the announcement and the tarball won't change afterwards.

So, ideally there'd be a check like:

  if not installed(collectd):
    install(collectd)

An alternative might be to keep track of Chef runs and include a
If-Modified-Since header in the request. The web server would then
simply answer with "304 Not Modified" is appropriate.

> I know there are several other cookbooks that perform similarly to
> mine and github doesn't make it easy to determine how popular your
> repo really is so I'm not sure if its me.

I'm not sure if I can determine the cookbook used from the request. I
doubt it, though.

One thing we could do is provide people with a recommended ("official")
cookbook for collectd. I have no experience with Chef nor Ruby myself,
but if someone would be willing to maintain that I'd be happy go create
an appropriate repository and permissions for it on Github.

Best regards,
—octo
-- 
collectd – The system statistics collection daemon
Website: http://collectd.org
Google+: http://collectd.org/+
GitHub:  https://github.com/collectd
Twitter: http://twitter.com/collectd
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.verplant.org/pipermail/collectd/attachments/20130208/8e577775/attachment.pgp>