Deprecation: Resource Cloning (CHEF-3694)

Chef allows resources to be created with duplicate names, rather than treating that as an error. This means that several cookbooks can request the same package be installed, without needing to carefully create unique names. This is problematic because having multiple resources with the same name makes it impossible to safely deliver notifications to the right resource.

In Chef Infra Client 13, resources with the same name will be treated as entirely separate, without any cloning of properties.

The behavior in Chef Infra Client 12 and earlier, which is now deprecated, is that we will try to clone the existing resource, and then apply any properties from the new resource. For example:

file '/etc/my_file' do
  owner 'ken'
end

file '/etc/my_file' do
  mode '0755'
end

will result in the second instance having the following properties:

file '/etc/my_file' do
  owner 'ken'
  mode '0755'
end

Resource cloning was deprecated in Chef Infra Client 10.18.0 and will be removed in Chef Infra Client 13.

Note

Chef will only emit a deprecation warning in the situation that a cloned resource is significantly different from the existing one.

Remediation

Ensure that resources you intend to notify are given unique names.