gistfile1.txt

Fine Grained Product Channels
---
RFC: unassigned
Title: Fine Grained Product Channels
Author: 
Tim Smith <tsmith@chef.io> 

Status: Draft
Type: Informational

# Fine Grained Product Channels

The goal of this RFC is to provide more fine grained product channels to make it easier for users of both the current, as well as the N-1 release, of Chef products to update to the latest releases.

## Motivation

As a Chef administrator,
I want to be able to pin to a stable channel corresponding to a particular major release,
so that I can easily run and update stable or N-1 stable releases.

As a power user
I want to be able to run the current (unreleased) version of N-1 Chef software, 
so that I can test upcoming releases.

As an Ubuntu / Debian user
I want to be able to use apt/yum repositories,
so that I can easily update to the latest stable version within a particular major release


## Additional Channels

In addition to the our ‘current’ and ‘stable’ channels we will add the following channels per product:

MAJOR_VERSION-current
MAJOR_VERSION-stable

For solutions such as the auto updater system a user will be able to select a channel such as 1-stable once the 2.X release goes to stable. This allows them to easily stay current on point releases while not changing their major release. 

For our apt/yum repositories we already have the channel within the URL so this would allow a user to easily pin to a channel such as 13-stable, where they would receive the most up to date Chef 13 releases.

Other tools such as mixlib-install and the install.sh script have a similar ability to select the channel and this would allow users to easily install the most recent stable release for their current major chef-dk, or chef-client release.

## Copyright

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