Re: [DRE-maint] Rubygems
Lucas Nussbaum dijo [Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 11:01:07AM +0200]:
> (Added a Cc on debian-ruby@lists.debian.org, some interested people
> might not be subscribed to pkg-ruby-maintainers)
(And following the list usage policy we have just been discussing, I
dropped pkg-ruby-maintainers ;-) )
> Hi,
>
> First, thank you for contacting us on that topic.
I must also thank you, Yehuda. We _do_ need to work closer to our
upstream community, and strongly welcome you!
> > 2) You want a simple way to install packages without needing the full
> > rubygems. To be honest, while you can appeal to the community to provide
> > setup.rb, it would in fact be easier for us to provide you with a tiny
> > subset of rubygems that can help you extract the installation information
> > from the gem specification. You can then find the bin directories, as well
> > as instructions for installing any binary gems. This will enable you to
> > install the parts of the gem where you want, and make it trivial to make
> > debian packages from rubygems. I would be willing to write something that
> > could serve as the base for a Rubygems=>Debian package converter if one does
> > not already exist.
>
> The point of setup.rb is that it enforces a layout that is sane. Of
> course, the same could be achieved by looking into the gem specification
> to extract the relevant info, as you suggested. I'm not very familiar
> with rubygems, but I have the impression that this solution might not
> apply to all current gems: it will still require a special organization
> of the files inside the gem to work. Can you give an example of the
> information from the gem spec that we will be able to use?
FWIW, in most cases what our group does is to drop a known-good
version of setup.rb in the build directory at build time, and it (most
often) works as it should. However, there are several examples where
setup.rb must be hand-helped to do the right thing (and even there, I
am not sure if my hand-helping is correct). As an example:
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-ruby-extras/trunk/libprawn-ruby/debian/rules
Disregard the portion where I discard a bunch of images (as they are
not DFSG-free) and ensure they stay discarded by comparing their MD5s
to my files'; what I am doing in this debian/rules file (which is the
instructions to build the Debian packages) is:
• In the clean and makebuilddir targets, I deal with ttfunk and pdf,
modules developed by the same author but under separate
repositories, which he explicitly requested me _not_ to ship as
separate packages; fortunately, it is enough to drop a link from
lib/ to ../vendor/ and setup.rb will do the right thing.
• Fonts and common files which do not really belong to either the 1.8
or the 1.9 packages (and which would cause conflicts if
simultaneously installed) are moved to a third package in which both
depend: libprawn-ruby-common. This is ugly, but the best way I could
work out.
FWIW, after talking with Lucas during DebConf9, there is huge hope
for simplification here, as we will most probably be moving to a
model where Ruby revisions will not have to be specified as part of
the binary package names... So things will be easier then :)
> > I understand that in a perfect world the Ruby community would conform with
> > Debian's desires here. In practice though, I think we can work toward a
> > solution that works for both communities with minimal fuss. I'm also
> > probably not the first person who's attempted this dialog. Some in the Ruby
> > community have decided to effectively write off Debian but I'm not willing
> > to do so.
>
> Well, I tried to start this conversation some time ago, and then decided
> to stay away from this topic as much as possible, since several
> "poisonous people" in the Ruby community (like Austin Ziegler) totally
> discouraged me from continuing. But we can try again, of course.
Yes, same experience over here, although I am more active among
Railsers and Lucas is a straight Rubyist. I have voiced some times the
needs we have¹, and got all kinds of results from the Ruby community -
including some very positive collaboration (such as the DebGem one²).
¹ http://gwolf.org/blog/its-just-different-mindset-not-necessarily-sane-one-though
http://gwolf.org/blog/apt-get-and-gems-different-planets-right-it-must-not-be-war-worlds
http://gwolf.org/blog/ruby-has-distribution-problem
http://gwolf.org/debian%20rails
² http://gwolf.org/blog/debgem-its-way
--
Gunnar Wolf • gwolf@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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