The current way to get a canonical chef repository is to create it yourself (which is error prone) or clone it from opscode/chef-repo. There are two problems with cloning the chef-repo:
Cloning brings the git history along with it, bulking up the history of your repository in general.
You'll have to tweak your remotes to switch origin to upstream and create a new origin.
I built out the functionality as a knife task (knife repo create NAME) to automate the creation of the directory structure and standard files (readmes and Rakefile). You can pass -p /path/to/repo to create the repo in a different directory than the current one.
I didn't include any tests, since it is just building a directory and file structure without any dynamic elements. I mirrored how this was done from the knife cookbook create task.
The only thing I don't really like is keeping the text of the files in the methods themselves and I am more than open to suggestions for improving that.
https://github.com/opscode/chef/pull/322
New Feature
Open
Unknown