Chef should complain when it can't find any cookbooks

Agreed - we should issue a warning here.

A warning will only help in interactive mode. If I run chef with no cookbooks, that's a mis-configuration, which should be a hard error so upstream shell scripts can detect it.. (i.e. cron jobs, etc.) If you're going to exit with an error, there should be something in the fatal log, not just the warning log.

The right thing to do here for solo is as Dan describes - exit with a non-0 exit code and log about the lack of any cookbooks.

For the chef-client, you should essentially just log - it's quite possible you'll be unconfigured at first.

Please pull from nuoyan/chef/CHEF-724.

Added check in the converge method in chef/lib/chef/client.rb.

If it's a chef-client run, check if the node has an empty runlist and if so, log a warn message.

If it's a chef-solo run, go through the Chef::Config[:cookbook_path] list, which may either be a string or array, and check if there's any file exist in the path provided. For example, if Chef::Config[:cookbook_path] is ['/Users/nuoyan/cookbooks', '/Users/nuoyan/kitchen'], it checks if there are files in any of those directories, if so, break the loop and go on to Chef::Compile. If there is no file in all of the paths in the list, raise CookbookNotFound error and log as fatal.

Pushed the fix to master. Thanks for the bug report Dan, and nice work on the fix Nuo.

setting the correct fixversion