Re: Facebook post-mortems...

[William Herrin <bill () herrin us>]

On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 6:15 PM Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com> wrote:
> They have a monkey patch subsystem. Lol.

Yes, actually, they do. They use Chef extensively to configure
operating systems. Chef is written in Ruby. Ruby has something called
Monkey Patches. This is where at an arbitrary location in the code you
re-open an object defined elsewhere and change its methods.

Chef doesn't always do the right thing. You tell Chef to remove an RPM
and it does. Even if it has to remove half the operating system to
satisfy the dependencies. If you want it to do something reasonable,
say throw an error because you didn't actually tell it to remove half
the operating system, you have a choice: spin up a fork of chef with a
couple patches to the chef-rpm interaction or just monkey-patch it in
one of your chef recipes.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin
bill () herrin us
https://bill.herrin.us/