[DRE-maint] DebGems announced (in beta)
Gunnar Wolf
gwolf at gwolf.org
Tue Jan 6 00:15:12 UTC 2009
Hi,
I am forwarding here a conversation I have been maintaining with with
Hongli Lai, from Phusion (the great coders that brought us
Passenger/mod_rails). I think this can be a great service (although
commercial) for some users.
Please excuse and blame me for any unclarity in pasting together
several mails here.
From: Hongli Lai <hongli at phusion.nl>
Dear Gunnar Wolf,
I've recently read your blog posts about RubyGems. Your blog posts have
sparked a lot of discussion about this subject.
If you're familiar with Ruby/Rails, then you might know us as the
authors of Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails. After reading the many
discussions on the RubyGems-and-Debian subject, we had decided to
develop a RubyGem-to-Apt conversion service. At the time of writing,
this service is almost ready to be launched as a public beta, but before
we launch we'd like to have feedback from prominent members of the
Debian community, such as yourself.
Would you be interested in this service? We've deployed a staging
version at http://debgem.phusion.nl/ We hope that you can provide
us with constructive criticism.
With kind regards,
Hongli Lai
--
Phusion | The Computer Science Company
Web: http://www.phusion.nl/
E-mail: info at phusion.nl
Chamber of commerce no: 08173483 (The Netherlands)
From: Gunnar Wolf <gwolf at gwolf.org>
> Dear Gunnar Wolf,
>
> I've recently read your blog posts about RubyGems. Your blog posts have
> sparked a lot of discussion about this subject.
>
> If you're familiar with Ruby/Rails, then you might know us as the
> authors of Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails. After reading the many
> discussions on the RubyGems-and-Debian subject, we had decided to
> develop a RubyGem-to-Apt conversion service. At the time of writing,
> this service is almost ready to be launched as a public beta, but before
> we launch we'd like to have feedback from prominent members of the
> Debian community, such as yourself.
>
> Would you be interested in this service? We've deployed a staging
> version at http://debgem.phusion.nl/
> We hope that you can provide us with constructive criticism.
Hi,
Sorry for not answering to you earlier - This looks _really_ nice. Of
course, it is a bit sad to me that you are offering this as a
commercial service, and we cannot integrate your work to our process,
but then again - it is a great service, that I'm sure will help many
people.
As for myself, I will not be using your service (after all, it takes
me only a couple of minutes to create a Ruby package by hand ;-) ),
but I will tell others about your service.
Still, if some comments are in place:
- Most of your users will be used to The Debian Way, as well as to The
Rails Way ;-) So, I think most of them will expect to have
_something_ in /usr/share/doc/<package> - I think it will be very
useful if you include there a small README file, pointing out it is
_not_ an official Debian package, and providing a link to your
site. Not every user of your packages will be the system
adminsitrator, and this will both reduce the number of spurious bugs
reported to our system, and get you further publicity ;-) For extra
points, you might want to move (or link, or whatever) the READMEs
and all to that directory.
- I see the layout you are using is quite similar to what Gems would
create (if not identical). Looks nice! :) Now, This _will_ need the
code to call your modules via gems. The relations between the four
packages created for each of them look interesting. Now, possibly
you should create links to the place where the latest current
package is from one of the depending packages - i.e. have
libfoo-ruby1.8 not as an empty package, but providing symlinks from
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/foo.rb (and whatever other hierarchies it has) to
./usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/foo.rb. Of course, I suppose you have
hashed this ideas quite a bit, but it could be an interesting way to
get better interoperation.
- When we have Ruby packages including sizeable amounts of
documentation, we generate a libfoo-ruby-doc package, with the
documentation compiled as HTML. It is also a nice plus to
have... Although it _will_ create lots and lots of little packages!
Anyway - best luck! Without a deeper revision yet, your project looks
_very_ useful. If you allow me, I will share this mail and reply with
the rest of the pkg-ruby-extras group.
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf at gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
From: Hongli Lai <hongli at phusion.nl>
Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Sorry for not answering to you earlier - This looks _really_ nice. Of
> course, it is a bit sad to me that you are offering this as a
> commercial service, and we cannot integrate your work to our process,
> but then again - it is a great service, that I'm sure will help many
> people.
>
> As for myself, I will not be using your service (after all, it takes
> me only a couple of minutes to create a Ruby package by hand ;-) ),
> but I will tell others about your service.
Hi.
I'm glad to see that you had a good impression. Your feedback and
support is much appreciated. :)
> Still, if some comments are in place:
>
> - Most of your users will be used to The Debian Way, as well as to The
> Rails Way ;-) So, I think most of them will expect to have
> _something_ in /usr/share/doc/<package> - I think it will be very
> useful if you include there a small README file, pointing out it is
> _not_ an official Debian package, and providing a link to your
> site. Not every user of your packages will be the system
> adminsitrator, and this will both reduce the number of spurious bugs
> reported to our system, and get you further publicity ;-) For extra
> points, you might want to move (or link, or whatever) the READMEs
> and all to that directory.
Very good idea, we'll work on this.
> - I see the layout you are using is quite similar to what Gems would
> create (if not identical). Looks nice! :) Now, This _will_ need the
> code to call your modules via gems. The relations between the four
> packages created for each of them look interesting. Now, possibly
> you should create links to the place where the latest current
> package is from one of the depending packages - i.e. have
> libfoo-ruby1.8 not as an empty package, but providing symlinks from
> /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/foo.rb (and whatever other hierarchies it has) to
> ./usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/foo.rb. Of course, I suppose you have
> hashed this ideas quite a bit, but it could be an interesting way to
> get better interoperation.
Yes we've been thinking about this. Plain symlinks are not guaranteed to
work because some gems expect that all files are under the same
directory tree. We do have another solution in mind and we intend on
implementing this in the future.
That said, I think that most Ruby software these days call "require
'rubygems'" before requiring third-party libraries anyway, so I don't
think that it's too big of a problem in practice.
> - When we have Ruby packages including sizeable amounts of
> documentation, we generate a libfoo-ruby-doc package, with the
> documentation compiled as HTML. It is also a nice plus to
> have... Although it _will_ create lots and lots of little packages!
Just curious, is it really necessary to package documentation
separately? From what I've seen, most people don't really care whether
the download is a little larger as long as it's easy.
> Anyway - best luck! Without a deeper revision yet, your project looks
> _very_ useful. If you allow me, I will share this mail and reply with
> the rest of the pkg-ruby-extras group.
Please feel free to share the email, though I should note that
http://debgem.phusion.nl/ is just the staging version. The final version
will be deployed on http://www.debgem.com/
We'll send you an email when we've launched.
Thanks. :)
With kind regards,
Hongli Lai
--
Phusion | The Computer Science Company
Web: http://www.phusion.nl/
E-mail: info at phusion.nl
Chamber of commerce no: 08173483 (The Netherlands)
From: Gunnar Wolf <gwolf at gwolf.org>
Hongli Lai dijo [Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 08:55:42PM +0100]:
> (...)
> >- I see the layout you are using is quite similar to what Gems would
> > create (if not identical). Looks nice! :) Now, This _will_ need the
> > code to call your modules via gems. The relations between the four
> > packages created for each of them look interesting. Now, possibly
> > you should create links to the place where the latest current
> > package is from one of the depending packages - i.e. have
> > libfoo-ruby1.8 not as an empty package, but providing symlinks from
> > /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/foo.rb (and whatever other hierarchies it has) to
> > ./usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/foo.rb. Of course, I suppose you have
> > hashed this ideas quite a bit, but it could be an interesting way to
> > get better interoperation.
>
> Yes we've been thinking about this. Plain symlinks are not
> guaranteed to work because some gems expect that all files are under
> the same directory tree. We do have another solution in mind and we
> intend on implementing this in the future.
Ok, I see... Still, this deserves some thinking IMHO. Now, is that a
good thing? Yes, I know symlinks don't exist in Windowsland, but
breakage upon finding a symlink... Smells like a bug to me. And yes,
if I didn't make myself clear, I was suggesting linking all files
(well, all .rb files - but if more are needed, every file could be
linked).
> That said, I think that most Ruby software these days call "require
> 'rubygems'" before requiring third-party libraries anyway, so I
> don't think that it's too big of a problem in practice.
And you can anyway state that you should "require rubygems" whenever
you use any gems on this project, yes. However, the Ruby world is much
larger than Rails, and there is a very large amount of code still
around from before Rails came into the spotlight. Gems are IMHO (but
you know Ruby's ways much better than me!) mostly a hack to allow for
Rails' idiosincracy to work with the strange mix of environments it is
usually used on... If you take oldish (but still working, probably
still under development) Ruby code, you will find many places where
things are 'require'd without any mention of Gems. I think this would
aid a wider adoption...
> >- When we have Ruby packages including sizeable amounts of
> > documentation, we generate a libfoo-ruby-doc package, with the
> > documentation compiled as HTML. It is also a nice plus to
> > have... Although it _will_ create lots and lots of little packages!
>
> Just curious, is it really necessary to package documentation
> separately? From what I've seen, most people don't really care
> whether the download is a little larger as long as it's easy.
Umh... Well, sometimes you want to install the documentation without
installing the rest of the package, or viceversa. Sometimes size does
matter - Especially when you have to take into account embedded
systems or the like. As an example, look at libpdf-writer-ruby1.8 and
libpdf-writer-ruby-doc - They are 200 and 860K respectively. If you
are installing on a device with 256MB of disk space (think, installing
on a USB key or on an appliance), almost 1MB _is_ sizeable.
Although, yes, usually the savings are not _that_ great. Anyway, the
generated HTML could be inside the package that generated it. We also
do it when it is not worth the separation.
> >Anyway - best luck! Without a deeper revision yet, your project looks
> >_very_ useful. If you allow me, I will share this mail and reply with
> >the rest of the pkg-ruby-extras group.
>
> Please feel free to share the email, though I should note that
> http://debgem.phusion.nl/ is just the staging version. The final
> version will be deployed on http://www.debgem.com/ We'll send you an
> email when we've launched.
Great!
Thanks,
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf at gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
Having said that... I am moving over the conversation to this list. I
am sure many more people can comment on the service much better than
myself.
Hongli and the people at Phusion are more than interested in getting
our points of view, and are very open to comments. This mail made me
very happy! Sometimes complaining leads to a good change ;-)
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf at gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
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