[Pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers] Re: RubyGems in Ruby HEAD

[mathew]

Paul van Tilburg wrote:

>On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 03:28:01AM +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>  
>
>>On 9/20/05, Mauricio Fernández <mfp at acm.org> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Right now, RubyGems represents a step backwards relative to Minero
>>>Aoki's setup.rb in many regards as far as repackagers are concerned.
>>>      
>>>
>>To be honest, this is one of my *least* worries. I know, Mauricio, that
>>it matters greatly to you, but I find that RubyGems has solved things in
>>a manner similar to stow.
>>    
>>
>
>But it is our most important worry!  As Debian developer this would
>increase my amount of work for packaging _and_ maintaining each Ruby
>library/app.
>

Are you actually intending to produce Debian .deb packages for every Gem?

I ask because coming from a Perl background, I've always found Debian's 
packaging of CPAN libraries to be incomplete enough to be problematic. 
For instance, last time I installed blosxom and some plugins, I had to 
go to CPAN for some standard libraries that weren't available as Debian 
packages. Once I have to go to CPAN even once, the value of repackaging 
the libraries in Debian format is lost--in fact, it becomes a liability. 
As others have already mentioned, you quickly end up with competing 
versions of the same library.

I expect the situation will ultimately be the same with Ruby. Right now, 
it might be feasible to repackage everything from RubyGems to .deb; but 
I doubt that will continue to be the case, with an arbitrary number of 
people writing Gems, and a small number of Gem to Debian repackagers.

The solution I would like to see would be the one taken by Gentoo for 
CPAN--provide a wrapper which incorporates the language's packaging 
system in the Linux distribution's packaging system. With Gentoo I run a 
script naming a CPAN package, and it builds a portage package for that 
CPAN package (or downloads the pre-packaged Portage package if one 
exists). That way, both Portage and CPAN agree about what's installed.

Anyhow... I'm making a mental note to release a setup.rb version of my 
forthcoming library as well as a Gem...


mathew