[Pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers]

[Esteban Manchado Velázquez]

Hi all!

On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 05:43:21PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> [...]
> After thinking about it for a while, I came to the conclusion that we
> have to consider the user's point of view. There are two kinds of
> library users :
> - those only using software that relies on this library. Those don't
>   care about rdoc documentation, etc.
> - those developing software using this library. Those want as much help
>   as possible.

    Agreed. In fact, I consider this pretty important.

> Therefore, I think ruby libraries should be packaged using two binary
> packages :
> - libxxxxx-ruby1.8: contains only /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/xxxx/* and the
> copyright/changelog stuff.
> - libxxxxx-ruby1.8-dev: contains examples, unit tests, rdoc
>   documentation, ri documentation.

    It's OK with me as long as all the stuff we decide to include in the -dev
package is really much bigger than the library itself.

    Just one comment: wouldn't it be better having all the dev files
documentation in a version independent package, like libxxxxx-ruby-dev
(instead of libxxxxx-ruby1.8-dev)?

> About unit tests: it would be great to have a common architecture to
> deal with our unit tests. This way, one could run a script on a regular
> basis to check that all his installed packages still work correctly.

    I'm not sure I like this. I would prefer using the Ubuntu proposal (or
something similar) for package testing, and somehow plug the own library unit
tests into the distribution package framework. After all, the package
maintainer is basically who needs/is interested in package testing...

> About ri documentation: is there a debian package already generating
> some of it, except the ri1.8 package itself ?

    What do you mean? Each package should generate its own documentation,
right?

> About rdoc documentation: it tends to be *big*. Here are some number
> while generating XMPP4R's documentation :
> [...]

    Wow. It's big indeed, and RI is more or less the same size, so it seems
that if we include either RI or rdoc documentation (which seems like a good
idea), the result is going to be _way_ bigger than the library.

    If we drop the unit tests, I think I would prefer having the packages
named libxxxxx-ruby-doc, instead of libxxxxx-ruby-dev.

    So, in short, I would vote for:

    1) Generating RI documentation for the package.
    2) Not generating rdoc documentation (I'm not sure about this one, but
seems redundant if we already have RI).
    3) Not packaging unittests at all.
    4) Having, for the foo library, libfoo-ruby, libfoo-ruby-doc (I prefer -doc
to -dev) and libfoo-ruby1.8 (and libfoo-rubyOTHERSUPPORTEDRUBYVERSIONS).

    Regards,

-- 
Esteban Manchado Velázquez <zoso at debian.org>
EuropeSwPatentFree - http://EuropeSwPatentFree.hispalinux.es
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