Cookbook fails to install on Chef 14

[royaldark]

Following the datadog Chef installation instructions on Chef 14 results in the following error:

$ knife cookbook site install datadog

[...unrelated output cut for brevity...]

Installing chef_handler to /home/joe/chef/cookbooks
Checking out the master branch.
Pristine copy branch (chef-vendor-chef_handler) exists, switching to it.
WARNING: DEPRECATION: This cookbook has been deprecated. No replacement has been defined.
WARNING: Use --force to force download deprecated cookbook.
Removing pre-existing version.
Uncompressing chef_handler version 3.0.3.
ERROR: Errno::ENOENT: No such file or directory @ rb_sysopen - /home/joe/chef/cookbooks/chef_handler.tar.gz

I believe this is because the chef_handler cookbook is pre-installed on Chef 14, and thus does not need to be listed as a dependency. Possibly the depends constraint in metadata.rb could be put behind a Chef version check?

As a temporary workaround, running knife cookbook site install datadog -D avoids dependency installation.

[olivielpeau]

Thanks for reporting this issue @royaldark (and sorry for the very late reply...)

Unfortunately I don't think there's a way in metadata.rb to put the depends constraint behind a chef version check. metadata.rb has fairly limited semantics.

So, this Chef 14 change is a significant breaking change for this cookbook. Unless I'm missing something I think we'll have to maintain a major branch of the cookbook for Chef 14+, and a lower major branch for Chef < 14.

This is a breaking change we'll probably want to make in the 4.x major release. Until then I'll make sure this workaround is documented. Let me know what your thoughts are.