It would be nice to have a convention for cookbook maintainers to follow so that submitting patches to existing cookbooks was a quicker process.

I’d suggest that of cookbooks should keep each cookbook as a separate git repo rather than bundling them all in a “cookbooks” repo or bundling them in a “cookbooks” folder within a “chef-repo” repo.

The reasoning is that when they’re individual repos, they’re easier to fork (you don’t have to keep renaming your existing “cookbooks” repo) and you only need to download code relevant to the cookbook in question, not a ton of cookbooks just to make a small change. Keeping cookbooks in a chef-repo repo (forked from Opscode) also makes it difficult to track forks & changes to a single cookbook, to see if another fork has already applied a patch you’re working on.