[Fedora-packaging] Ruby guidelines draft - further discussion

Bohuslav Kabrda bkabrda at redhat.com
Thu Mar 29 10:53:21 UTC 2012


Hi,
as it was said on the fpc meeting, I'm writing to comment on the section "Some Notes" in Toshio's draft of new Ruby packaging guidelines [1].

[citing the lines from "Some Notes" one by one]

- "Need to move the rubygems library into the per-interpreter directories as it is a non-gem library."
As we have said with Mo Morsi, Rubygems library should stay out of Ruby directory structure.
Pros:
-- Prooves to Rubygems and JRuby upstreams that Rubygems library can be unbundled from Ruby and it makes sense to work on merging the JRuby changes in Rubygems upstream to make one general Rubygems library (that should therefore be implementation-independent).
-- As noted by Toshio on the fpc meeting, our system-wide Rubygems are currently only used by MRI Ruby. But as I've said, we need to take steps gradually to convince the upstreams of feasibility of such changes and not to break anything. It is true, that JRuby currently ships with it's own modified (non-compatible) version of Rubygems, but we are working to merge their changes into Rubygems upstream. So yes, currently in F17, there is only the MRI Ruby using the system-wide Rubygems, but the support for JRuby is comming (perhaps F18?). If we are discussing this only from F17 point of view, we still may want to package Rubinius there (it is on our todo list, although not that high as JRuby) and Rubinius _would_ be able to use the system-wide Rubygems - that is another reason why Rubygems should stay where they are even in Fedora 17.

Cons:
-- Toshio says that he doesn't like special-casing and Rubygems should ship inside each of the Ruby implementations, until we make all the changes to have system-wide Rubygems, that work with all Ruby implementations (I hope I am not misinterpreting you, if yes, then please correct me). I'd like to add, that it is very hard to convince Rubygems upstream to make any changes that we need and we must have something to show them it's worth the work to merge the JRuby changes in.
-- Any others?

- "Need to rebuild ruby and rubygems package to use the new location"
-- I think that depends on whether the Rubygems library is moved, so let's put it aside for the moment and discuss it afterwards.

- "Need to rebuild rubygem packages to use the new interpreter-neutral rubygem library location."
-- Same as above.

- "Should there be more information about jruby, etc in the introductory portion (naming and" [unfinished]
-- I think it would be good to postpone this until we have better integration with the other Ruby implementations. So far, no one has requested any JRuby specific packages or anything connected with JRuby, so I would leave that for a separate discussion/fpc ticket.

- "gem2rpm and rpmdev-newrpmspec can be updated with the new template"
-- Yes, we will do that once the guidelines are complete. I hope that the gem2rpm part of guidelines will then be added back.


Thanks for reading this through :)

-- 
Regards,
Bohuslav "Slavek" Kabrda.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Toshio/RubyPackagingDraft#Some_notes


More information about the packaging mailing list