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Re: AdHoc BoF: Ruby in Debian



On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 01:20:04PM +0300, David Moreno Garza wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 22:03 +0300, Dmitri Borodaenko wrote:
> > - can we help with or take over upstream of Ruby/DBI (I maintain the
> > package, but I'm too dumb and busy to do that myself)?
> 
> I'd like to talk a bit with you about this, are you available today? It
> seems that I'll be in Smökki the whole day (until 20 hrs), please come
> and we can discuss, you can reach me on IRC, #debconf, under the nick
> 'damog'.
> 
> > - should we/when will we phase out ruby1.6?

Good point.  I don't know if there are still libraries that only work
(well) on 1.6?  I don't use any of them anymore.

> > - scripting libraries and FHS: /usr/lib or /usr/share?

I for one think this is a good idea.  However, as I have noticed during
patching setup.rb, rbconfig is a bit inconsistent with itself, so while
doing this possible transition, I think we can help out here as well
with some work towards upstream.

> > - packaging of rubygems

I have been mailing with Daigo Moriwaki about his Rubygems package.  The
package itself is finished (in the normal sense of the word, it's a nice
valid, working package).  However, there still are the concerns
regarding the introduced source incompatibility[1], the fact that gem
installed libs can override system installed libs and that one gets to
'packaging' management systems.

> > - packaging of rails

The package is large, but it works.. some stuff could be split off so
that it can be reused.  Also, there is the packaging of Rails apps
themselves that have to be kept in mind. For example Instiki, which uses
railties, actionpack, etc.

> Thanks: There are tons of topics to discuss.

Indeed, I still have some:

- documentation

  The Policy still has got 'to be written' notes on parts talking about
  documentation.  Some discussion about whether to add stuff about
  RDoc documentation and RI documentation would be good to have:
  Which dirs should the generated docs go to? Should RDoc documentation be
  generated for all libs in Debian? 

  I was trying to working on a rubydoc (meta-)documentation tool ala
  perldoc, but got stranded because the docs are virtually located
  everywhere and not as accessible as it would seem.  If distributions
  resolve these issues, a rubydoc tool could be possible.
  
- versioning

  There seem to be a dozen ways a Ruby library is made available for
  different Ruby versions in Debian.  Some packages have a -ruby1.8 and
  -ruby1.6 suffixed version and some do not, some have a versionless
  dummy package (suffix -ruby) that depends on the current Ruby version,
  some have a virtual package that arranges this, and sometimes there is
  nothing at all.  Where IMO the policy is clear on the matter of module
  package names, it is not on this "dummy package" matter, I think it
  should me straightened out.

- compliance with/use of Package

  Christian Neukirchen has proposed (and is AFAIK already working on) a 
  Python distutils-alike system for installing Ruby libraries, apps and
  extensions in unified way, called Package[2].
  With our support and this making it into the Ruby core, it could help
  us a lot.  Instead of having to adapt packages to install it with all
  kind of special cases, all could be done with the same debian/rules or
  CDBS class (that I am currently working on, but suspended it until the
  whole setup/install stuff is resolved).  Christian hasn't got much
  response from our side yet, but he (and I) is/are really interested.

  On a side note, there was some discussion on #debian-ruby lately about
  the strange behaviour of setup.rb under Debian.  Since the default
  prefix is /usr, but libs are installed to
  <prefix>/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8, the lay user, completely unware of
  this, will install custom scripts into /usr/bin!  Or, if he changes
  the prefix to /usr/local, the libs into /usr/local/local/lib/....  
  I have proposed a different option layout of setup.rb[3] to Aoki, but
  he hasn't responded yet.  I have talked with Christian and he told me
  Package will also have such a dual-mode layout.
  
- Debian Ruby Maintainers team / libruby-extras
 
  This team is being forged during the past few weeks/months with its
  first main goal to bundle a few useful small libraries that also
  should be recommended to be installed under a libruby-extras dummy
  package.
  There is an Alioth project for this (pkg-ruby-extras) and all interested
  are invited to join us (contact me or David Nusinow/gravity).
  When this package is created, we probably can add more Ruby app/lib
  packages to be supported by this team... thoughts?

I am also interested in results of discussions around the above noted
points of interest.  
I hope that you guys can advertise the IRC channel and this list a bit,
the more interested people, the better.

I'll be in the IRC channel from 16:00 - 19:00 (+0300/EEST) if you need me.

Have a good BOF :)

Paul

1: http://lists.debian.org/debian-ruby/2005/02/msg00009.html
2: http://lists.debian.org/debian-ruby/2005/06/msg00001.html
3: http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?SetupRbSwitches
4: http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ruby-extras/

NB. I was quite tired writing this mail, forgive me for my typo's,
    strange grammer and word swaps.

-- 
Student @ Eindhoven                         | email: paulvt@debian.org
University of Technology, The Netherlands   | JID: paul@luon.net
>>> Using the Power of Debian GNU/Linux <<< | GnuPG key ID: 0x50064181



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