Having begun using Chef over the last year I've found that my problem has not been so much with chef (a major issue with how it deals with when/whether to resta

Having begun using Chef over the last year I've found that my problem has not been so much with chef (a major issue with how it deals with when/whether to restart services aside) itself but with the community cookbooks. This is where the overcomplexity tends to come in in my experience. I'm not sure you can genuinely have a good provisioning script that treats all of these things as variables in a matrix: - OS (sometimes including windows as well as linuxes and bsds) - OS version - Using system packages or building from source - Package/source version - Every single config variable the program/service can have Every time we use a community cookbook, which includes several hundred plus lines of code to deal with platforms we will never ever deploy to, it ends in tears eventually. Having a 20 line recipe that works on the Ubuntu LTS we've standardized on is much closer to what FSS can achieve, but even then it does often make simple tasks considerably more difficult.