[DRE-maint] Bug#470798: liblocale-ruby1.8: conflicts with libgettext-ruby1.8

[Antonio Terceiro]

Package: liblocale-ruby1.8
Version: 0.1-6
Severity: normal

Currently a "require 'locale'" in Debian is ambiguous:

liblocale-ruby1.8: /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i486-linux/locale.so
libgettext-ruby1.8: /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/locale.rb

liblocale-ruby is currently inactive upstream, but I contacted the
original author and he already agreed to pass the project to me.

The main difference between liblocale-ruby is that it is able to set the
system locale, what affects most notably date formatting, for example:

----------------------8<------------------------8<-------------------------
$ irb
>> require 'locale.so'
=> true
>> Time.now.strftime('%x')
=> "03/13/08"
>> Locale::setlocale(Locale::LC_ALL, 'pt_BR.utf8')
=> "pt_BR.utf8"
>> Time.now.strftime('%x')
=> "13-03-2008"
----------------------8<------------------------8<-------------------------

At the same time, libgettext-ruby seems to be the de facto gettext-like library
for Ruby, I myself use it for several projects.

I'm copying libgettext-ruby1.8 maintainers hoping that they can provide
some input in the subject. Would you guys have some idea about this?

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=pt_BR.utf8, LC_CTYPE=pt_BR.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages liblocale-ruby1.8 depends on:
ii  libc6                        2.7-9       GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libruby1.8                   1.8.6.114-1 Libraries necessary to run Ruby 1.

liblocale-ruby1.8 recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information

-- 
Antonio Terceiro <terceiro at softwarelivre.org>
http://people.softwarelivre.org/~terceiro/
GnuPG ID: 0F9CB28F