[Mageia-dev] [RFC] Ruby packaging policy

[Remy CLOUARD]

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.

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 ?

Is it ok to add development dependencies as Suggests ? Shall we do a
-devel subpackage that will pull these dependencies. The advantage of
doing this is that automated installs will not add these dependencies
where they aren’t needed, but this will cause spec files to be more
complicated to maintain (unless we add proper support for this in
gem2rpm)

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

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)

Normally %gem_* macros should take care of that, but we might have to
make it evolve.

Do you see something I haven’t thought of ?

I will provide an example spec in this policy in the following days, and
will take care of making the necessary changes to the existing packages
once we agree with the above points.

Thanks in advance,

Best regards,
-- 
Rémy CLOUARD
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