tar package provider

Closed duplicate CHEF-408 and taking assignment.

Initial implementation available here: http://github.com/seancribbs/chef/tree/CHEF-81

Here ya go. Ping me when you're ready for more testing

Just so you remember:

[Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:42:43 -0700] DEBUG: Downloading from server: cookbooks//files?id=otp_src_R13B01.tar.gz&platform=mac_os_x&version=10.5.7&fqdn=AJ-Christensens-MacBook.local&node_name=AJ-Christensens-MacBook.local&checksum=
[Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:42:43 -0700] DEBUG: Sending HTTP Request via GET to /cookbooks//files?id=otp_src_R13B01.tar.gz&platform=mac_os_x&version=10.5.7&fqdn=AJ-Christensens-MacBook.local&node_name=AJ-Christensens-MacBook.local&checksum=

Also, if I omit 'cookbook', fetching from the chef server doesn't work as intended with remote_file normally - Doesn't seem to be passing through the lack of specifying a cookbook through, so runs a request to /cookbooks//files (instead of cookbooks/whatever/files)

merb : worker (port 4000) ~ Cannot find a cookbook named files; did you forget to add metadata to a cookbook? (http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Metadata) - (ArgumentError)

As Sean's work is almost complete, I'm going to take this over the finish line for 0.7.10.

Couple of features missing (non fetching), and a few idemotency checks not working as expected.

going to 0.7.12

forgot to change fixver

Please to be merging for 0.8.0? I don't see it in the current master.

Codes not ready, has some tests outstanding!

Un assigning myself.

kallistec (Dan) had the last work on this, too: http://github.com/danielsdeleo/chef/tree/CHEF-81

I, too, have a vested interest in seeing this become a more permanent feature in chef. I've done a sort of hacky definition that seems to suit our purposes quite well. Check out this gist:

http://gist.github.com/366043

For example, we run a custom apache/php combo stack on our various application servers and sometimes their exact configuration differs between roles. In the past, we've solved the actual configuration of our nodes by precompiling these packages on a set of build vms (based off our current VM baseline) and rsync their install to a filer mount that's shared RO to all other nodes. The target node then NFS mounts this (filerX:/vol/packages/built/centos_5/x86_64 -> /z/services), and the nodes in the specific role symlink /usr/local/{apache,php} to /z/services/apache/2.2.14-prefork or /z/services/php/5.3.2

This lets us apply the 'build::apache' or 'build::php' to the run_list of our 'ign-build-c5_64' node (cent5 x86_64 build node), and then apply 'farms::oyster' to an application pool we have for 'roles::oyster'.

I saw this pull request in the cookbooks project for a tar_package LWRP.

https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/pull/209

Is that a desired approach, or would a core Chef provider be preferred?

In response to myself, a generic primitive is preferred to a specific
tool. This could be a common enough pattern that other archive formats
can be supported besides just .tar.{gz,bz2}.

This is common enough to be reasonable for inclusion in core Chef per
this ticket, and it wouldn't create an additional cookbook dependency.

Are any of these patches still viable?