[Mageia-dev] [RFC] Ruby packaging policy

[Michael Scherer]

Le vendredi 07 janvier 2011 à 23:45 +0100, Remy CLOUARD a écrit :
> Hello there,
> 
> It’s been quite some time since I started working on ruby modules, and
> I’ve been working on the policy too.
> 
> You can find the page here:
> http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Policies/Ruby
> 
> Now, there are some things that still need to be clarified.
> 
> The most controversial part is the naming convention.
> 
> Many ruby modules are packaged via gem, and fedora introduced a strange
> naming convention, calling their package rubygem-%{gemname}. This
> convention was soon followed by other rpm-based distro such as opensuse
> and momonga, and we also have some of them.

This cause problem since we do have rpm present twice ( without people
noticing, as I dicovered when trying to use gitorious ). More ever, this
is confusing for packagers. There is also potential breakage if someone
start to do tarball, then gems, etc etc. 

I have already expressed my opinion on the subject, and still maintain
it :

ruby rpm should be ruby-*.

Several people ( Pascal Terjan
http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2010-11/msg00063.php , Guillaume
Rousse ) also raised concern about this when this discovered after being
pushed 1 year ago without discussion
( http://lists.mandriva.com/cooker/2010-03/msg00401.php ) . 

Python does also have egg, and they play nice with rpm ( ie, we ship
file that make egg think our python module are installed as egg ).
Cpan also provides archives ( but that unused )


> I’m not against changing that convention, but this raises also other
> questions.
> 1) Do we also need to change the provides/requires ? ie
> Requires: ruby(%{gemname})
> instead of
> Requires: rubygem(%{gemname})
>
> 2) is there a way to make youri watch for rubygem-%{gemname} in case we
> opt for that change ? Or better, can youri watch for %{gemname} on
> rubygems.org ?

yes. Just need a patch :)

> About files:
> shall we keep the gem in the cache directory ? I’m not sure this is
> really useful, up till now I added it, but it makes the package a bit
> bigger

Well, what is the goal of keeping the source in two location ?

> Shall we do a -doc subpackage for big packages ? I think it may be
> interesting for package that have a lot of documentation and that are
> part of an ecosystem (ie, gems required for other packages like
> gitorious)

That's not specific to ruby. Again, we should follow existing
conventions.

-- 
Michael Scherer