Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Orion Poplawski]

On 09/11/2015 10:08 AM, Vít Ondruch wrote:
> Dne 11.9.2015 v 17:21 Matthew Miller napsal(a):
>> On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 03:51:33PM +0200, Vít Ondruch wrote:
>>>>  * Increases the available pool of software that can be packaged
>>>> substantially (many modern languages such as Ruby and Go are
>>>> realistically only functional with allowable bundling)
>>> Not sure why you put Ruby into this group. There is no evidence that
>>> bundling is more prominent in Ruby then in other languages. If your
>>> judgment is based on existence of rubygem-bundler, then you completely
>>> misunderstand purpose of the project.
>> Really? I think it's completely fair to say that "vendor everything!"
>> has at least historically been a cultural norm for Ruby development.
>>
>>
> 
> So what are your chances to install for example Redmine on Fedora?
> Bundle everything using Bundler, because Fedora does not provide
> multiple versions of Rails.
> 
> And I repeat it again and again, rails32-3.2-1, rails40-4.0-1,
> rails41-4.1-1 and rails42-4.2-1 packages with all their dependencies are
> not way forward. The tooling should support rails-3.2-1 and rails-4.0-1
> simultaneous installation, but even the minimal step towards this, i.e.
> treet the packages as install only packages and allow the upgrades when
> only release is changed  is actively denied by all parties involved in
> tooling.

This is a very pertinent point.  Especially the for languages like ruby and
python, having multiple versions of packages installed simultaneously would be
incredibly useful.

I think that wrapping up ruby and python packages into rpms seems to be of
dubious benefit.  These projects have their own package management systems
(that at least in ruby's case can handle multiple versions).  I'm very much
tempted to get out of the business of packaging these things and just let
people use the upstream language tools.  What does Fedora users gain with "dnf
install rails" or "dnf install ipython" versus "gem install rails" and "pip
install ipython"?

Although at the moment it's a complete disaster with python pip as it will
overwrite rpm install system files.


-- 
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA, Boulder/CoRA Office             FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane                       orion at nwra.com
Boulder, CO 80301                   http://www.nwra.com