Bringing GitLab in Fedora

[Ken Dreyer]

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 6:49 PM, Axilleas Pipinellis
<axilleas at archlinux.gr> wrote:
> So what are your thoughts? Any guidance, ideas or insights are very much
> appreciated!

Hi Axilleas,

I think this would be great. I'm working on Gitorious myself, and it
looks like Gitlab would share many dependencies. So that would make my
job easier :) You might want to check out my wiki page [1]. I'm trying
to keep it up to date so that I can have a visual indicator of the
scope of the work. If nothing else, it might help you brainstorm how
to track your own dependencies.

In packaging Gitorious, there are four, fast-moving pieces:

1. Fedora (eg. the Ruby guidelines change almost every other release)

2. Ruby (eg. Ruby 2.0 will soon land in F19)

3. Rails (eg. Rails 4.0 will not run on EL6's Ruby)

4. And then upstream Gitorious itself is also changing.

I've come to find that packaging Ruby on Rails web apps is a special
kind of pain :) I'm still plugging along at it with the hope that it
will get easier. It seems like the Ruby community has learned from the
1.8 -> 1.9 conversion, and from what I understand, 2.0 brings fewer
backwards-incompatible changes. I'm hoping that this greater focus on
backwards compatibility will trickle down to the Rubygems culture as
well. In the mean time, it's still really challenging to make all the
puzzle pieces fit together while following Fedora's update policy
guidelines, etc, and I anticipate many more months of work.

It looks like Gitlab's Gemfile.lock is even bigger than Gitorious', so
you must be really ambitious!

One thing that you may want to look into up front is the idea of
running Gitlab's test suite inside mock. I was sad to find out that
Gitorious' test suite requires a running MySQL server instance, which
means that I can't run the test suite inside Koji. I wonder if
Gitlab's test suite has the same requirement. You may want to bring
this up with your upstream devs.

- Ken

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ktdreyer/Gitorious