ruby rails, gem packages

[David Lutterkort]

On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 06:50 -0700, John Taber wrote:
> which is why I suggested to not include gems in Fedora and let users get 
> gems from the gem sources.  I think the best place to address the 
> problems with gems vs distros is probably in the Ruby community, 
> although since most of them are on Macs, fair amount even on Windows, I 
> don't think they recognize some of the same issues.

I agree that packaging gems is a lot of work, but for all the reasons
given by others well worth it. As a case in point, imagine what
installing ovirt would look like if we did not have rubygem-* RPM's: we
could build an ovirt RPM that pulls in all the RPM-level dependencies,
then an ovirt gem that pulls in all the gem-level dependencies, and fix
bugs forever because of version skew.

There are a lot of things, both in gems themselves, and in the release
process of various ruby projects, that makes all this harder than it has
to be. But by packaging gems for Fedora, we're also in an excellent
place to encourage upstream to follow practices that mesh better with
building a complete distro (though we've done much less of that so far
than we should have)

David