Is there any harm to having a cookbook downloaded and located on a given server, despite it not executing? I think not. The depends allows for dependency handling, and this cookbook depends on yum, as the EPEL recipe is needed for older versions of RedHat. (Ref: COOK-1016)

In any case, the yum cookbook should have no impact on Debianoid systems.

Is there any harm in requiring users on all platforms to download and
add the yum cookbook when the only people that need yum will already
have it?

Absolutely.

On Aug 3, 2012, at 7:33, Mike Fiedler
[email protected]
wrote:

Is there any harm to having a cookbook downloaded and located on a given server, despite it not executing? I think not. The depends allows for dependency handling, and this cookbook depends on yum, as the EPEL recipe is needed for older versions of RedHat. (Ref: COOK-1016)

In any case, the yum cookbook should have no impact on Debianoid systems.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#14 (comment)

What is the harm? It only gets executed on the system if you put the recipe in the node's run list.

If a recipe is included in another recipe, especially in the case of 'yum', it would be through a conditional for the platform / platform_family, e.g. CentOS but not Ubuntu.

I agree with @cosmin on this one. Is there no way to do optional dependencies based on platform?

No, there is no support for optional dependencies in Chef. Same reason so many cookbooks need to depend on windows and runit even if they aren't using them.

Because there is no way to include optional dependencies (yet), we are going to close this ticket. For a detailed explanation, please see COOK-1491. Also, please watch CHEF-3871 and CHEF-3282 for details regarding platform-specific metadata dependencies.