Heads up: Rebuild for Ruby 1.9.3

[Vít Ondruch]

Dne 25.1.2012 00:52, Rex Dieter napsal(a):
> Mo Morsi wrote:
>
>> On 01/24/2012 04:50 AM, Bohuslav Kabrda wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> since we finally got our Ruby 1.9.3 feature page [1] approved, we are
>>> starting rebuild for Ruby 1.9.3. Everyone who owns a package that depends
>>> on Ruby or Rubygems should rebuild it in the special Koji target
>>> "f17-ruby". This target will be merged into rawhide just before the
>>> branching, which will occur on 2012-02-07. After this deadline, you will
>>> need to go through the standard Bodhi update process. The detailed
>>> instructions on rebuilding the packages, including our suggested changes
>>> can be found in [2]. Feel free to contact me or Vit Ondruch (vondruch at
>>> redhat dot com) or write to ruby-sig mailing lists, if you run into any
>>> kind of problems.
>>>
>>>
>> I'm somewhat confused. Has the issue w/ sudo gem install been resolved?
> Any citation or bug references for this problem you mention?
>
> -- rex
>

Let me clear the situation. First of all, this is not issue of "sudo gem 
install". That command works just fine. That is issue with Bundler. 
Unfortunately, Bundler is one big hack above RubyGems based on some 
assumptions which are not true. It can be seen on its code where is a 
lot of custom logic for specific version o RubyGems and Bundler has a 
lot more quirks with regard of its usage on package driven systems. It 
can break for example with every upstream change of RubyGems. Now what 
is the issue:

Ruby, speaking about upstream as well as 1.8 in Fedora, traditionally 
broke the FHS. We tried to remove this breakage with Ruby 1.9. RubyGems 
traditionally installs their binary extensions into the same place as 
their platform independent code, incompatible with FHS. To be somehow 
compatible with FHS, this was changed and for Ruby 1.8, the binary 
extensions were installed into ruby_sitedir. That results in conflicting 
binary RPMs which conflicts among their versions, although this was 
never the case for RubyGems packages. So for Ruby 1.9.3 we tried to work 
on this issue and we modified RubyGems to be able to load the libraries, 
where the noarch part is placed in share and the binary library in lib, 
so RPM packaged gems are installed into /usr/share and their binary 
libraries into /usr/lib. Moreover, we changed how RubyGems works, e.g. 
by default, "gem install" installs gems into your home directory, so you 
don't need sudo to work with gems anymore. However, if your are using 
"gem install" with root users, they are installed into /usr/local/share 
and their binary libraries are installed into /usr/local/lib.

Now there comes Bundler. Assuming it knows everything about RubyGems, 
they put together their custom logic how to populate Ruby's load paths, 
which does not work well with changes we made into RubyGems, i.e. it 
cannot add the binary extension path to the Ruby's load path, resulting 
in failure when loading the gem. Nevertheless, this is going to be 
handled in RPM packaged Bundler and it will work properly as long as 
user uses RPM packaged Bundler. Once somebody installs upstream version 
of Bundler, the Bundler fails naturally.

So there are probably 4 solutions to this issue:

1) Always use Bundler provided by Fedora which will works as it should.
2) Force Ruby and RubyGems upstream to properly support FHS. I already 
provided patches [1] but I need your support.
3) Revert the customized behavior of RubyGems and break FHS.
4) Treat root as regular user and install gem also into root's home 
directory, but it obviously doesn't make sense.

So obviously I have chosen 1) and trying to move forward with 2). That 
works most of the times. It breaks only in situation, when you install 
upstream Bundler using "sudo gem install" and later you want to use some 
system wide gem with binary extension. If you install gems using "gem 
install" into your home dir (preferred, default way), it works every 
time. Mixing of RPMs with other package managers has its limits and this 
is one of them.


Vit

[1] https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/210