Opinions on rubygem subpackages

[Matthew Kent]

Hello ruby-sig!

I'm currently working on packaging Chef 
(http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home) which has presented some 
some interesting challenges and I need some advice.

Currently their primary distribution method and focus is rubygems, 
though they have produced Debian packages. When using Chef via rubygems 
the actual setup is done by downloading and running a 'bootstrap' tar.gz 
which does a number of things all over the system (putting configs in 
place, installing more gems etc). The goal of packaging Chef is to avoid 
this arbitrary 'bootstrap' step and contain everything required to run 
Chef within packages.

Packaging the gems is easy enough, but the daemons, configs and 
directories it requires seem to fall outside of the scope of what the 
current rubygems packages do (as far as I can tell).

For my first target, the Chef client, my thinking is to produce 2 
packages - the main rubygem then a 'chef' subpackage that ships the 
binaries, man pages, init scripts etc. Check it out here:

http://magoazul.com/wip/SPECS/rubygem-chef.spec

I couldn't find anything in the wiki about *not* doing this with 
subpackages but I'm unsure if it would be frowned upon.

Thoughts?
-- 
Matthew Kent | http://magoazul.com