Hrm, I don't think this is caused by distro-specific special-casing. As far as I can tell, this would be because we install the package earlier now. I don't know why this was needed, though. @rhafer do you remember why?

Btw, looking more closely at this recipe: why does it create the rabbitmq user as well as the /var/{log,lib}/rabbitmq directories? Don't all rabbitmq-server packages on all distros do this? I just checked, and on Ubuntu Lucid, it seems to be handled by the package already.