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

[Noah Kantrowitz]

On Feb 8, 2013, at 1:37 AM, Florian Forster wrote:

> 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.

I actually double-checked mine after seeing the notice posted since I know a lot of people use it and I am only doing package installs so it should't be hitting anything on your servers (unless you happen to host an Ubuntu mirror). As for standardization, my cookbook was among the earliest for collectd so it got spread out a lot that way, but there are some serious divergences in a few forks so it isn't totally clear what to do. The Chef community site unfortunately doesn't (yet) support github-style namespacing so there can only be one cookbook published there as "collectd" but I'm happy to work with the other authors to figure out which that should be. As for the last-modified stuff, https://gist.github.com/coderanger/08e93d2f03bd4e875264 shows how to do that in Chef for anyone scripting source installs. Hope this helps!

--Noah
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