Hello! It’s time again for a new release of Chef – this one is chock
full of interesting bug fixes, a few new features, and lots of
feedback.

This release’s MVP is Arjuna Christensen (fujin!) – we went to bed last
night with 6 bugs in the 0.5.4 release, and woke up this morning with
none, and that was totally awesome-tastic. In addition, AJ is always
around helping people out and answering questions – so thanks, AJ, we
couldn’t have done it without you. If you hit a bug in 0.5.2, the
odds are that AJ fixed it in 0.5.4.

Red Hat folks, we now support Yum packages. :)

Last releases MVP, Bryan McLellan, kept up the strong showing – he
fixed a few bugs, and he delivered a DPKG provider.

Sean Cribbs, of Radiant CMS fame, swooped in and fixed up Remote File
on Solo, and gave all kinds of valuable feedback about Chefs internals
and tests. Yay Sean!

Joshua Sierles has published the recipes in use by 37 Signals. Check out the dynamic djbdns recipes.

Lots of great tickets being filed by the crew in #chef – thanks for
all the help.

Release Notes – Chef – Version 0.5.4

Bug

• [CHEF-48] – Invalid default recipe causes merb 500 error
• [CHEF-64] – chef-server pukes if you type an invalid url in the openid login
• [CHEF-72] – Templates used in definitions searched for only the cookbook they are used in
• [CHEF-76] – Search queries return empty results occationally
• [CHEF-77] – Indexer broken – theoretically creates index, but cannot read them
• [CHEF-82] – user provider doesn’t handle ‘shadow’ not being installed correctly
• [CHEF-87] – File specificity (preferred file) is broken by dotfiles
• [CHEF-89] – remote_file doesn’t support being passed a URL as a source, but the documentation argues otherwise – solo only
• [CHEF-90] – Search in recipes does not allow for attribute selection, even though the REST API does.
• [CHEF-92] – When loading the prior resource we should never load its action
• [CHEF-94] – Definitions should allow access to the node object within the parameter setting block
• [CHEF-95] – not_if’s string behaviour is broken, closed stream
• [CHEF-96] – group resource doesn’t if members is empty so it always tried to add them
• [CHEF-97] – not_if and only_if cause exceptions in popen4
• [CHEF-108] – @@seen_recipes is a class variable, this makes chef-client and chef-solo *not* run any recipes after the first run in daemon mode
• [CHEF-110] – interval / splay needs to be supported outside of daemonized mode for chef-client
• [CHEF-111] – user provider mistakenly attempts to modify the user even if no changes are required
• [CHEF-114] – when not given an interval on the command line, chef-client runs in a tight loop driving server load up
• [CHEF-117] – Can’t setgid if you have already setuid-ed
• [CHEF-123] – User provider fails to correctly compare a numeric GID to a string GID
• [CHEF-124] – Chef-server should set reload_classes false
• [CHEF-125] – chef-server init.rb should set Merb log_stream to the location supplied by chef/server.rb

Improvement

• [CHEF-71] – service resource :supports attribute too rubyish and unlike :action
• [CHEF-73] – When specifying a custom gem source for a gem_package, also include rubyforge in the list of sources so gem dependencies can be installed
• [CHEF-106] – refactor search, move attributes to search function : chef/chef-server/lib/chef/search.rb, chef/chef-server/lib/controllers/search.rb
• [CHEF-107] – more informative message for info log on package upgrade
• [CHEF-127] – cron resource should log to info for update/add instead of debug

New Feature

• [CHEF-59] – Package resource need Redhat provider
• [CHEF-91] – Chef Client should reload the configuration on SIGHUP