Headless Branches for Cookbook Repositories

While Opscode isn't using this method for our own Cookbooks, other people in the community who wish to collaborate and share cookbooks may be interested in this technique.

From the README.markdown in Community Member Tim Dysinger's repository

Instead of one big cookbooks dir to rule them all, you can merge in the branches you would like into your main git-based cookbooks repo.

Create a new cookbook repo

Add this to your $HOME/.gitconfig

Create a new headless branch for your own recipe

Fork a recipe from someone else and work on it

You can share a branch with multiple related recipes to make it easy for others

You can create a new headless branch for each of your clusters you manage