Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master' into HEADjdm/merge-into-12-stable

* origin/master: (642 commits)
  Remove Chef 12 release notes
  Update Changelog for Chef 12.1.0
  Chef 12.1.0.rc.0
  Group spec needs to respond to shell_out
  fix dpkg regression
  fix Lint/BlockAlignment
  whitespaces fixes
  fix Lint/AmbiguousRegexpLiteral
  fix Lint/LiteralInCondition
  fix Lint/Loop style
  Make tests pass on Windows
  remove unreachable code
  Fix unit specs for PR #2934
  dont raise exceptions in load_current_resource when checking current status
  update changelog
  fix typo in msi provider
  Added spec for #2914
  fix virtual package logic in check_package_state
  use scalar pkg not array package
  convert is_virtual_package to hash
  ...

Conflicts:
	.travis.yml
	CHANGELOG.md
	DOC_CHANGES.md
	RELEASE_NOTES.md
	appveyor.yml
	lib/chef/application.rb
	lib/chef/dsl/recipe.rb
	lib/chef/knife/bootstrap.rb
	lib/chef/knife/core/bootstrap_context.rb
	lib/chef/node/attribute.rb
	lib/chef/node/attribute_collections.rb
	lib/chef/node/immutable_collections.rb
	lib/chef/resource.rb
	lib/chef/run_context.rb
	lib/chef/version.rb
	spec/functional/dsl/reboot_pending_spec.rb
	spec/functional/event_loggers/windows_eventlog_spec.rb
	spec/functional/resource/link_spec.rb
	spec/support/platform_helpers.rb
	spec/unit/knife_spec.rb
	spec/unit/mixin/deep_merge_spec.rb
	spec/unit/mixin/shell_out_spec.rb
	spec/unit/node/attribute_spec.rb
	spec/unit/node_spec.rb
	spec/unit/provider/package/apt_spec.rb
	spec/unit/provider/service/systemd_service_spec.rb
	spec/unit/provider_resolver_spec.rb
	spec/unit/recipe_spec.rb
	spec/unit/resource/resource_notification_spec.rb
	spec/unit/run_context_spec.rb

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/lib/chef/api_client.rb b/lib/chef/api_client.rb
index 334fb23f38..ce9ceb312c 100644
--- a/lib/chef/api_client.rb
+++ b/lib/chef/api_client.rb
@@ -96,7 +96,7 @@ class Chef
       set_or_return(
         :private_key,
         arg,
-        :kind_of => String
+        :kind_of => [String, FalseClass]
       )
     end
 
@@ -124,7 +124,7 @@ class Chef
       Chef::JSONCompat.to_json(to_hash, *a)
     end
 
-    def self.json_create(o)
+    def self.from_hash(o)
       client = Chef::ApiClient.new
       client.name(o["name"] || o["clientname"])
       client.private_key(o["private_key"]) if o.key?("private_key")
@@ -134,6 +134,14 @@ class Chef
       client
     end
 
+    def self.json_create(data)
+      from_hash(data)
+    end
+
+    def self.from_json(j)
+      from_hash(Chef::JSONCompat.parse(j))
+    end
+
     def self.http_api
       Chef::REST.new(Chef::Config[:chef_server_url])
     end