FUDCon:Milan 2011 - Ruby SIG meeting

[Hugh Brock]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 01:37:33PM -0400, Darryl L. Pierce wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 03:02:10PM -0400, Mo Morsi wrote:
> > > This is a small part of what I mention above. One of the things we
> > > discussed was a complete separation of things like specific versions of
> > > Rails (and other gems) from version of Fedora. IOW, why should F14 be
> > > Rails 3.1? Why not let us run Fedora 17 with whatever version of Rails
> > > we choose?
> > >
> > 
> > Not sure if I'm following, you can always gem install any version of any 
> > gem you choose. We are talking about the single supported stack in Fedora.
> 
> I'm talking about completely separating Ruby gems from Fedora. So, for
> example, installing Fedora XX won't require rubygem-rails yy.xx.
> Insteadl, _all_ Ruby gems would be kept in a separate, optional yum
> repository. Then you could maintain the gems separately.
> 
> So if you're app requires Rails 2.3.11 and farkle 3.1, even though those
> aren't the latest, then you could install them without having to hunt
> down, grab and install the RPMs (and then do the same for all
> dependencies) manually. The one repositoryw ould have 2.3.8, 2.3.11,
> 3.0.0, 3.1.0, etc. and all dependent versions available.

This is probably going to give fedora packagers massive heartburn, but
I think Darryl is on the right track here.

To really make this work you also need a way to install multiple
stacks of gems on the same machine. So I need for example to be able
to have two different Rails apps installed, each of which may depend
on different and conflicting package sets, and have everything work
and be happy. As horrible as this is from a support standpoint, it is
the way the Ruby world works, and trying to get away from it is
swimming upstream...

/me ducks large rocks

--Hugh

-- 
== Hugh Brock, hbrock at redhat.com                                   ==
== Engineering Manager, Cloud BU                                   ==
== Aeolus Project: Manage virtual infrastructure across clouds.    ==
== http://aeolusproject.org                                        ==

"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m
not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
--Robert McCloskey