[DRE-maint] Bug#796020: Bug#796497: reconsidering the removal of ruby-hpricot

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Antonio,

Antonio Terceiro wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 06:26:06PM +0200, Christian Hofstaedtler wrote:
> > We're not going to have ruby-hpricot in stretch.
> 
> ruby-hpricot has now only 2 reverse dependencies: ruby-ronn and
> ruby-fast-fs. However, the number of packages build-depending on
> ruby-ronn only grows, and is currently at 54¹

Noticed that, too, mostly because I'm partially guilty for that,
because I use ronn to generate unburden-home-dir's man page from
Markdown since 0.4, to be able to also provide the man page in the
online documentation as HTML.

> ruby-hpricot is indeed dead upstream, but so is a lot of software in
> Debian. Also, being dead upstream does not mean not being useful, or
> necessarily being broken.

Fully agree. Especially ronn does a real good job.

> So I think we should give up on removing ruby-hpricot until at least one
> of the following happen:
> 
> - ruby-ronn gets rewritten to not use ruby-hpricot (unlikely since ronn
>   is dead upstream itself)

Indeed:

* Last release June 2010: https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/releases
* Last commit in August 2013: https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/commits/master
* Last comment by author on issues or pull requests in August 2013:
  https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/pull/77#issuecomment-22620549

> - something else can replace ruby-ronn and we manage to make reverse
>   (build) dependencies switch to it.

Before starting to use ronn in an official release of
unburden-home-dir, I tried different tools and was very unsatisfied:

* go-md2man
* pandoc

There is also https://github.com/sunaku/md2man which is not yet
packaged. Haven't tried that one yet since it requires a newer version
of rubygems (2.5.2) than in Debian Unstable (2.5.1):
https://github.com/sunaku/binman/issues/4

		Regards, Axel
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