Totally agree on your thoughts with relying on env. variables - I hit the same issue with trying to write re-usable Chef code. Another pro tip w/r/t environmen

Totally agree on your thoughts with relying on env. variables - I hit the same issue with trying to write re-usable Chef code. Another pro tip w/r/t environment variables: NEVER rely on $PATH - that should be considered a global variable that any arbitrary piece of code in your process can modify at will since everyone knows about it. I know Jruby use to rely on this for their Ant integration and it was annoying as hell before it was fixed.