chef-aix-resources

chef-aix-resources is a public, community-maintainable before-state snapshot of the AIX-specific Chef Infra Client resources and providers that were previously bundled with Chef.

This gem is optional. Chef does not depend on this gem, and it is never discovered or loaded by the premium platform loader. Applications that need the snapshot must explicitly require it:

require "chef"
require "chef_aix_resources"

Requiring chef_aix_resources also loads Chef when Chef has not already been loaded. The entrypoint is idempotent and leaves an already-defined AIX implementation in place.

Included AIX implementation

The snapshot supplies the AIX-specific implementations for:

• cron
• group
• ifconfig
• mount
• package and bff_package
• SRC service
• AIX init-script service
• user and aix_user

The source is kept close to the Chef implementation from which it was copied. Its local command execution behavior and Chef resource/provider declarations are intentionally preserved. The copied target_mode declarations are kept for compatibility with the source version; this gem is not the private premium Target Mode implementation.

Snapshot provenance

The initial snapshot was copied from Chef Infra Client 19.4.40 before the AIX implementation extraction. Later changes to Chef do not automatically flow into this repository; updates should be intentional community-maintained snapshot revisions.

Compatibility and limitations

• The gem currently targets Chef >= 19.0, < 20.0.
• Its gem metadata permits Ruby >= 3.0.3 to retain the lowest Ruby version accepted by the AIX branch of the current Chef packaging. Chef currently requires Ruby >= 3.1.0 on non-AIX platforms.
• AIX Ruby distributions and native Ruby dependencies are not consistently packaged across current AIX environments. Installation and execution of the full Chef dependency set on AIX have not been promised or validated by this snapshot.
• The unit suite uses mocked command results and can run on a non-AIX host. Functional resource execution still requires an AIX host, appropriate privileges, and the native AIX commands (installp, lssrc, lsfs, mkgroup, and others).
• This repository does not modify Chef core. If a Chef release already defines one of these AIX classes, the entrypoint does not replace it.

This is a community starting point rather than an official support promise. There is no guaranteed maintenance schedule, compatibility guarantee for future Chef releases, or commitment to repair unsupported AIX Ruby packaging. Issues and fixes are welcome from the community.

The private agentless-aix-extensions project is a separate, go-forward Target Mode implementation. It is not included here and should be treated as the authoritative implementation when it is explicitly loaded for premium Target Mode use.

Development

Use a released Chef gem by default:

bundle install
bundle exec rspec

To test against a local Chef checkout:

CHEF_PATH=/path/to/chef bundle install
CHEF_PATH=/path/to/chef bundle exec rspec

The same focused suite is available through:

bundle exec rake spec

Build and inspect the gem locally with:

gem build chef-aix-resources.gemspec
gem check chef-aix-resources-*.gem

License

Copyright notices for the copied source remain with their original authors. The project is distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0; see LICENSE.