Re: Packaging Ruby extensions

On Dec 15, 2008, at 3:31 PM| Dec 15, 2008, martin f krafft wrote:

FYI, ruby packagers (see attached message) ...

From: flameeyes@gmail.com (Diego E. 'Flameeyes' Pettenò)
Date: December 15, 2008 2:34:36 PM EST
To: distributions@lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: Packaging Ruby extensions

Hi everybody!

Since in the last weeks there has been quite some talking about RubyGems
and the way both Debian [1] and Gentoo [2] find its packaging system
sub-standard, I'd like to involve all the Ruby packagers from the
various distribution in working on some document regarding these issues.

I've slowly started writing up a "Ruby Packaging Specification"
describing for now the issues and then providing guidelines on how to
prepare upstream packages that can be quickly packaged by vendors
without pain.

I think this is a great idea and should allow us to help the Gems community grow in a way thats compatible with the rest of the world. I don't think anyone here wants Gems to die or change into something thats no longer Ruby specific. We just want to be able to work *with* it and not against it.

The draft which for now only contains some structure and one
Gentoo-derived issue, is available at
http://www.flameeyes.eu/rps/rps.xhtml and the GIT repository for it is
at git://git.flameeyes.eu/flameeyes/rps.git . I've chosen GIT+DocBook 5
because I sincerely find a Wiki to be a bit too volatile for some more
substantial documentation about the issue, and would like to have a
track of who adds what and similar, but that's obviously open to
discussion.

The document looks like a great start and we should add any Debian APT specific issues. One thing that I see missing is an overall resolution - what would make us happy? Another thing is the status of packages that are currently built for Debian. Why can we package those but not the others? I'm not much of a Ruby (Rails) developer or a Debian packager but I've had problems with Rails doing weird things with soft links. Is this the place to document these types problems and how to work around them?

[1] http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html
[2] http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2008/12/12/id-rather-keep-myself-away-from-gems
--
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/