Yes, I mean the regexes.  I was actually trying to figure out if there are cases I'm not covering.  Do some people not pass the root_dir in?  How can that possibly work?  If they do pass the root_dir in, why are we not matching on the entire root_dir?  Is there some symlink thing?

As far as subdirectory specificity, CookbookVersionLoader handles that with loads_recursively_as and friends: https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/cookbook/cookbook_version_loader.rb#L47-L55 .  I'd be OK with re-checking it here, but it seems redundant--what do you think?