Re: Bits from the Ruby team: switching to Ruby 1.9 and trasition to new policy
On Sat, 2012-06-02 at 07:43 -0300, Antonio Terceiro wrote:
> TL;DR: we are switching to Ruby 1.9 as the default Ruby interpreter.
> Ruby 1.8 will still be available in Wheezy, but will be dropped in
> Wheezy+1.
I realise this was mentioned on -release and no-one said "no, don't do
that". However, given that it was raised within a month of when it's
been indicated that we want to try and freeze, I had hoped that the
thread might at least get some discussion.
To be entirely honest, I was assuming that my raising a query regarding
the originator of the -release thread not appearing to have previously
had any involvement in the packaging of the core Ruby packages would
have led to some follow-up from the previous uploaders of those packages
indicating whether it was representative of their views, rather than
simply progressing to a d-d-a mail. I could have been more explicit
about that though.
> # What it means for package maintainers
>
> If you maintain a program that is written in Ruby and it is not
> compatible with Ruby 1.9, then you should change shebang lines to use
> `/usr/bin/ruby1.8` instead of `/usr/bin/ruby`, and make your package
> depend explicitly on `ruby1.8`.
Was any of this communicated to package maintainers beforehand?
Although I don't know offhand if the Ruby bindings produced by gdal are
inherently not compatible with Ruby 1.9, I do know that the
ruby-defaults switch has made it FTBFS whilst involved in a transition
and I can't see any relevant bugs filed. (I assume there are more such
issues, this is just one I'm aware of because of the transition
involvement.)
> The easiest way to support the new Ruby policy is to use gem2deb [3],
> our new Ruby packaging helper. It is not mandatory, though, and as long
> as packages follow the new Debian Ruby policy, everything is good.
>
> [3] http://packages.debian.org/gem2deb
Based on http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=675974 , it
looks like gem2deb + ruby 1.9.1 breaks dh_ruby-using packages. Is this
a known issue?
> # Current state of the transition to the new policy
>
> The Debian/Ruby Extras team [4] has transitioned all its packages
> (except for some that are still stuck in NEW) to support the new policy
> (i.e. changed package names and install locations). There are however
> still quite some source packages not maintained by the team that still
> provide binary packages called lib$foo-ruby{,1.8,1.9.1} (52) or install
> in /usr/lib/ruby/{,1.8,1.9.1} (91). See also [5] for an overview (note
> that the list contains a few false positives). The Debian/Ruby Extras
> team is willing to help out with updating the packages to the new
> policy. We will start filing bugs against non-migrated packages very
> soon.
That's over 150 packages, which sounds like quite a lot to have
outstanding if this is intended to be "the way things are" for Wheezy.
>From what I've seen so far, this doesn't immediately sound like
something that would qualify for freeze exceptions for the affected
packages.
Regards,
Adam
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