Towards a Fedora Ruby appserver

[Mohammed Morsi]

  On 10/26/2010 09:59 AM, Guillermo Gómez wrote:
> El 26/10/10 03:41, Gaveen Prabhasara escribió:
>
>> I only started using rvm recently, and therefore can't comment on how
>> primetime ready it is. But given all the benefits it's say it's definitely
>> worth checking.
> I still dont use it but agree its worth checking...
>

The problem with rvm in this context is that its a package management 
system in itself. Sure gem also provides package management and 
deployment capabilities, but we aren't using those features in Fedora, 
rather we are just making use of the package format.

It is generally not the best practice to start combing package 
management systems on a system wide basis. For individual users and 
developers its acceptable, but for many admins you just can't do that, 
you need a single tested / proven software stack, installed / configured 
/ deployed via one standard means. Without this, Ruby on Fedora will not 
be acceptable in certain deployment scenarios.


>> I'm not saying that it has to be rvm and only rvm, but the idea sounds neat.
>> There would be some packaging changes necessary if we are to achieve a
>> rvm or any other good multi-ruby env.
> I really dont feel comfortable with fedora multi-envs in general. Fedora
> being Fedora, im not sure we should have it or not. Keeping and "old"
> environment (compat) is more like a enterprise level requirement and i
> dont know we have enough human resources in ruby-sig/pacakgers to deal
> with it.
>
> I already have a friend who's complaining about F14 not pushing the
> envelope and just including sw updates, what he said, "not fun at all".

On the other hand, I'm sure there are users who would complain if things 
change too much without consideration. I agree that we should try to 
keep up with upstream as much as possible, so as not to stagnate, and in 
the long run I don't think this is going to be a major problem as 
projects mature and stabilize, but for the time being we need to find 
that fine line between these rapidly changes and stability / backwards 
compatibility.


> I feel the Fedora way pushes us to move to 1.9 for F15. If we can cope
> with a multi-envs, fine, but for me is a low prio.
>
>

I don't think its as big of a deal for Ruby itself, as we can ship both 
and phase 1.8 out over time. Also there are many gems which have reached 
stable points and shouldn't cause a problem here on out. Its the gems 
(such as rails) that have seen alot of api instability recently that is 
cause for some concern.

So here is an idea I just came up with. gem and rpm are both package 
formats, so we have gem2rpm to perform the conversion from the dev 
community format to the Fedora system format. If rvm and yum are both 
package manement systems, and the dev community perfers rvm while Fedora 
prefers yum, would a tool such as rvm2yum make sense? This wouldn't 
solve the problem of having one standard Ruby/Fedora deployment scenario 
which I still think would be necessary, but if we combine it with 
something like Copr, we could also support deploying custom ruby 
software stacks for various purposes, all integrated with Fedora.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Copr

Haven't spent time considering all the ramifications, and as suggested 
we would still need to come up with an 'official' stack to ship with 
Fedora itself. Any thoughts?

   -Mo