The following are brief justifications of the foodcritic exceptions being used in the first pass of foodcritic bug-bashing. In most cases we are excluding rules to make the amount of work more manageable for this first pass. In a few cases, the core cookbook team doesn't think that a rule is appropriate for the Opscode community cookbooks.
Ensuring that a cookbook works without a Chef Server is often more work than a simple if statement around a call to search. The READMEs for these cookbooks should clearly state that they currently require a Chef Server and adding conditionals throughout a recipe to also account for this limitation often only serves to clutter the recipe.
In the long run, we welcome better support for chef-solo-style use cases.
