applicationsonline/librarian — Issue #31: Feature: Submit patch via upstream issue (Github specific)
Author: hedgehog
Created: 2011-12-09 05:57:19+00:00
State: open

I like that Librarian just grabs the cookbooks, I have tried submodules and they don't work in this situation - far to much fiddling and untangling the inevitable mess is a real pita.

Nonetheless, it would be nice to allow people to easily contibute changes back to the upstream cookbook. In github this is possible, via the issues API. Essentially Librarian would (non-trivial):

- Build a diff of the current local cookbook from what is pointed to in the `Cheffile`
- Open an issue and place the diff in the issue. Not ideal I know but at least allows people to get their contributions back in one painless step, i.e. they don't have to have a fork. But they do have to have a Github account.

The command might look like

librarian-chef issue

In order to open an issue librarian would need to have access the users Github OAuth2 token, say through `ENV['GITHUB_TOKEN']`. No token no push of the patch.
Of course this is very Github specific, but other avenues might open later, e.g email the patch.

The idea is to make it dead easy for people to push back what changes they have made that work for them. Cookbook maintaners/authors could pick and chose as they wish.

Thoughts