[DRE-maint] Bug#596351: ohai is required for Chef

Chris Butler chrisb at debian.org
Sun Dec 19 14:53:46 UTC 2010


Apologies for the delay; I forgot to subscribe to the bug and therefore
missed your response.

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 04:27:51PM -0700, Joshua Timberman wrote:
> Ohai is required for Chef. Is this a localization issue that can be fixed upstream in Ohai?

Well chef was not in lenny either, and has a similarly low popcon count. It
could be considered for removal from squeeze as well, especially at this
late stage in the squeeze release.


On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 08:33:01PM -0700, Joshua Timberman wrote:
> The JSON gem has a history of issues, and while it seems that 1.1.9 may
> otherwise be stable, it is a year old and has a lot of improvements. So
> far I have not seen any issues with version 1.4.6, in ohai or otherwise. I
> hope that Debian can make an exception for getting the latest version into
> Squeeze. As the package maintainer for ohai, I don't think that patching
> ohai to workaround this bug is appropriate.

I doubt that the Release Team would accept a new upstream version now (nor
do I think they would've accepted it a month ago), so that is not really an
option.

One suggestion, made by Neil Williams, was to patch ohai to output a useful
error message when it encounters an invalid character. In other words,
replace the fairly meaningless exception with a useful error message,
detailing what the problem is (invalid utf-8 character) and the file/line of
the problem. IMO this would make the bug non-RC, as it should make it
obvious to the user how to fix the problem.

Is that something that would be quick and easy for you to do? I had a quick
look at the ohai source to see if I could provide a patch, but I'm not
familiar enough with the source or Ruby itself to work out where to modify
it.

If the above is not possible, I return to my previous suggestion of removing
ohai & chef from squeeze. Once wheezy is up and running, there should be no
problem getting the new libjson-ruby package in. There's always the option
of providing packages via backports.debian.org once squeeze is released.

-- 
Chris Butler <chrisb at debian.org>
  GnuPG Key ID: 4096R/49E3ACD3






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