Re: Where does data provided by ruby packages go?

[Jérémy Lal <jerry@edagames.com>]

On 17/01/2010 16:12, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> I am upstream for a ruby app I am in the process of designing/writing.
> The app is intended as a piece of Debian infrastructure, so writing it
> to be easily packaged is an important concern.  I explained a little
> bit about what I'm doing here (probably not, now that I think of it,
> the right list for this, which may explain why it got no responses):
> 
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers/2010-January/004436.html
> 
> Today's problem is this: the application will provide static data in a
> 'data' directory.  On a Debian system, I believe it should be installed
> somewhere under /usr, but I am not sure where.
> 
> I asked #ruby @ irc.freenode.net and mostly got blank stares.  They
> said that the normal approach here is to use rubygems, and suggested I
> look at other gems to find out what they do.  Well, my problem with
> that advice is that of all of the gems I have ever installed, only snmp
> both provides data and is in Debian (the libsnmp-ruby1.8 package), and
> I don't trust that as a good example to follow.  In snmp/mib.rb, the
> upstream package looks in two locations, one relative to the code (for
> the all-in-one-dir approach, e.g. either a gem, or running the code
> in-place, checked out from revision control) and the other relative to
> rbconfig's Config::CONFIG["datadir"], which on a Debian system
> is /usr/share. However, for the latter, it expects the data to be
> in ./ruby/snmp/mibs, and since there is no precedent in Debian for
> putting data under /usr/share/ruby, the maintainer has replaced
> the all-in-one-dir location with a
> hard-wired /usr/share/doc/libsnmp-ruby1.8/yaml/.  This also seems
> wrong to me, as the files provided are not really documentation.
> 
> So where do I go from here?  There should be some standard way for a
> package to either work in an all-in-one-dir arrangement *or* with data
> stored relative to Config::CONFIG["datadir"] but I can't find a single
> example of code that does this in a way that would mesh well with
> Debian.
> 
> Ben
> 

Hi,
you could have a look at redmine package (a RoR app),
which deals with defining proper paths for these cases :
static data, www-dir in /usr/share/redmine(/public)
cached data in /var/cache/redmine
uploaded data in /var/lib/redmine(/files)
configuration yml in /etc/redmine
logs in /var/log/redmine

Regards,
Jérémy Lal