Ruby / Fedora Testing Repos

[Mohammed Morsi]

Hey just a quick update w/ some work I've been doing towards getting a 
platform which to test Ruby on Fedora. I've pushed many updates to 
Polisher (http://github.com/movitto/polisher), the focus of which has 
been expanded to manage any generic upstream project release process. 
Special cases have also been added to make use of the gemcutter API and 
gem2rpm for gem based projects. I've also added a Ruby DSL which can be 
used to descibe any number of projects w/ sources, and setup 
post-processing workflows to be executed on releases.

I've grabbed several popular Ruby related packages in Fedora, made some 
small modifications to the specs, and setup Polisher scripts 
(http://github.com/movitto/polisher-scripts) to run through simulated 
releases of various versions, setting up the following yum repos 
(http://projects.morsi.org/polisher/repos) in the process:

   * stable       - same packages that are currently in Fedora updates
   * maintenance  - later releases in the same major version branch of 
the packages currently in stable
   * devel        - packages that work w/ Ruby 1.9 (great <a 
href="http://isitruby19.com/">resource</a>)
   * rawhide      - all latest ruby project versions

By tweaking the Polisher scripts and rpm spec file templates, the 
contents of these repos can be changed and new ones can be setup for any 
target software stack.

You can simply point a yum repo entry towards any of those repos 
beforing running a yum update to get all the latest Ruby packages 
provided by that repo, through there most likely will be breakage as 
Polisher and the scripts themselves are a work in progress.

I'm also setting up various virt appliances, each pointing at a 
different Polisher generated repo by default, so that anyone can just 
download a VM image containing Fedora and a complete Ruby stack for 
whichever version of Ruby they want to use. It's a work in progress, I 
will put links up on my blog (http://mo.morsi.org/blog) as I upload the 
images.

Obviously this is all a work in progress and it is quite a bit of effort 
to get Polisher scripts written for every Ruby related package, but if 
this thing starts rolling, I can see this as being a useful tool in the 
"upstream project to Fedora repo" process as mass parallel source 
releases can be triggered and handled easily in a committable / 
reproducible / reliable fashion. If anyone has any cycles I'd appreciate 
any help (patches, testing, etc).

Stay tuned for more updates.

   -Mo