RFC: adopting libxml-ruby

[Brett Smith <debian@brettcsmith.org>]

Hi everyone,

libxml-ruby is pretty much exactly what you'd expect: nice OO Ruby
bindings to libxml.  It was orphaned a while back amidst various
licensing and development troubles upstream; see #335698.  It looks like
that all has been settled, so I'd like to adopt the package and get the
newest version into Debian.

I've prepared an initial package at
<http://www.brettcsmith.org/debian/libxml-ruby/>.  I've got a sponsor
lined up already and he's provided me with a lot of useful feedback, but
I'd love to get any other comments that could help get this package in
great shape.  One thing that's particularly bothering me is a patch to
the project's Rakefile in .diff.gz, to disable a dependency on Ruby
Gems.  I'd like to handle this patch with one of the formal patch
systems if possible, but if I do that, I can't easily call rake from the
clean target, which seems like a bigger problem.

If anybody's interested in trying this package out and letting me know
what you think, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,

-- 
Brett Smith