I sent an email out to the chef list today about releasing an unofficial Chef 0.7.16 fork to tide some of us over until 0.8 ships as Opscode does not plan any more 0.7.x releases. I use this internally at $job and pushed it out to github by request. I have no plans to push another release but will if there is demand internally or externally. This includes the security patches in 0.7.16 and a couple bug fixes:

* [CHEF-706] – mount provider fails to mount samba/cifs devices (Device does not exist)
* [CHEF-634] – UI fails silently when unable to save node
* [CHEF-659] – UI expands some escaped characters from JSON, then fails to encode them again

You can grab this tree from github, or use the debs built in my launchpad PPA.

Rather than making additional blog posts as the build for Chef 0.8 alpha has progressed, I’ve been updating this gist each time I test another build cycle. My original instructions are here. There is another blog posts here and some instructions for running under screen as well.