To: debian-ruby@lists.debian.org Subject: help wanted with the Ruby toolchain Hi, This is a call for help with the Ruby toolchain. We, the current maintainers (Antonio Terceiro and Christian Hofstaedtler) are not planning to go away, but we need more people to help with keeping Ruby up to date in Debian (and derivatives). What exactly is the Ruby toolchain ---------------------------------- The Ruby toolchain is the set of packages you need for a basic, functional Ruby installation, and to build the rest of the Ruby packages. This includes the following source packages: core toolchain: * bundler * gem2deb * rubyX.Y (currently X.Y = 2.3) * ruby-defaults * rubygems-integration * ruby-standalone packages extracted from standard library: * rake * ruby-did-you-mean * ruby-minitest * ruby-net-telnet * ruby-openssl (not yet strictly speaking, but will be for ruby2.5) * ruby-test-unit Notes: * There may be other packages extracted from the standard library in ruby2.5 beyond ruby-openssl, so this list may grow a little bit. * Some of the packages above are already managed like any other team package, thanks for those already working on them. Ideally, all of them should. What maintaining the Ruby toolchain entails ------------------------------------------- Generally, maintaining the Ruby toolchain means two things: 1) keeping the Ruby toolchain packages in shape There is nothing very special this, except that it requires a certain amount of care given the large amount of other packages that depend on the Ruby toolchain. We are currently good enough with regards to automated testing. I would say that it should be fairly easy to know when things break, so this should not prevent anyone from sleeping at night. 2) handling Ruby transitions A transition is the process by which we replace rubyX.Y with rubyX.(Y+1) (or +2). This part is the one that requires the most amount of work, but it only needs to happen once for each Debian release. In the past we did it twice per release, but we recently agreed to do a single transition for Buster going from ruby2.3 to ruby2.5 [TRANSITION-BUSTER], and if that works well there will be no reason for us to go back to doing two per cycle. At this point, the process is fairly understood, and documented at the wiki [TRANSITION-DOC]. That documentation could, and probably should, be expanded. The entire Ruby team does really nice work fixing the stuff that needs to be fixed. The role of the toolchain maintainers here is more having an overview of the process: keeping track of what needs to be fixed, reporting bugs, poking people to fix their stuff, eventually writing patches to fix important blockers, keeping the release team informed, etc. This is a reasonable amount of work, but it also gives you a nice view of how the release process works (at least with regards to testing migration), how Ruby works, etc. In general, I always feel I learn a lot during these transitions. What are (were?) our immediate plans ------------------------------------ ruby2.5 should be released by Christmas 2017, and that's what we will have in Debian 10 (buster). By November we should have an RC or preview release out, so we could be doing test rebuilds and all that with a preview of ruby2.5 even before the actual release. The sooner we start working on it, the more time we will have to get things in shape for the release. Also, Ubuntu 18.04 freezes in the beginning of 2018. It would be nice if at least the basic part of the migration is done by then, so they can already release with ruby2.5. If you care about Ruby on Ubuntu, it would be in your interest to help. What we want from potential co-maintainers ------------------------------------------ Basically we need help with the tasks described above, because depending on only the two of us will make the upcoming transition take longer than usual. Neither of us will be able to be the main drivers, but we will be around to help, answer questions, etc. Once we have a few volunteers to help, we can think of ways of improving knowledge transfer and the available documentation, such as IRC/videoconf sessions, sprints, etc. If you are willing to come on board, please say so. You do not need to be a DD or DM to help. References ---------- [TRANSITION-BUSTER] https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20170609012532.mh5kkn452izczoq4@debian.org [TRANSITION-DOC] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby/InterpreterTransitions Thanks, -- Antonio Terceiro and Christian Hofstaedtler Ruby toolchain maintainers
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