Coordination with upstream for deprecating code in rubygems
Hello!
Please let me know if this is not the right place to post/discuss
something like this. This is not an issue with `rubygems-bundler` or any
other debian package. I would just like to understand better and get
feedback on what's the best way the proceed in situations like the one I
will explain, and future similar situations.
I'm a maintainer of the upstream rubygems and bundler libraries. We're
recently getting several reports about deprecation warnings. But the
warnings are not happening in code under our control, but inside the
`rubygems-bundler` package. See
https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/3068 for example.
The situation is:
* Rubygems automatically loads an `operating_system.rb` file if it's
present. This file is meant for packagers to adapt rubygems for their OS.
* In debian, this customization lives at the `rubygems-integration`
package. In particular, the file is here:
https://salsa.debian.org/ruby-team/rubygems-integration/blob/19f2071a0f6e40ac04cdeae7fbcb14880aa24bf6/lib/rubygems/defaults/operating_system.rb.
* We deprecated some constants in recent versions of rubygems.
`rubygems-integration` addressed the deprecations in
https://salsa.debian.org/ruby-team/rubygems-integration/commit/0290aa5b3b2e7d1c07d91a4c8e1e971903903d57
and shipped that as version 1.13.0 of the package. However, until the
release reaches users they will keep using old versions without the
deprecations fixed.
* When users run `gem update --system` to upgrade rubygems, the latest
version of rubygems (which deprecates the constants) gets installed on
their system, and they start getting all the warnings because the
`operating_system.rb` file is not updated.
So, my question is, what would be a good way to alleviate this problem
and improve the situation?
Some thoughts:
* Users shouldn't upgrade rubygems through the `gem update --system`
way, they should use their package manager for that. However, I'm not
sure if debian provides such a way, since there seems to be no separate
`rubygems` package?
* We (upstream) could maybe detect that a debian package is being
updated through `gem update --system` and show a warning or something.
However, I'm not sure of a reliable way to do that?
* Maybe, we (upstream) could try deprecating things only on new rubies
(which have not yet been packaged), so that by the time the debian
package is created, it already comes with the deprecations addressed.
Any thoughts anyone about all this?
Thanks a lot,
David.
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