Hey everyone, (please reply-all or cc: me) I just found your rubygems->debian packages project last night. Creating debian packages is new to me, and as a developer I probably don't care for them just like any other pure developer, but I was harassed by some Perl developers recently that they have a "cool CPAN module -> deb package" script, and we don't. Pooey to them.
Can I ask a whole bunch of questions? Hopefully none of them seem rude. I have no idea about the debian packaging structure, the debian community of core developers, package developers and users (though I have typed 'apt-get' before and have used fink on OS X), nor the pkg-ruby-extras project. So I don't know what parts of the pkg-ruby-extras project structure are critical (e.g. do packages have to go in the packages folder in order to be made available to the debian universe, or are they made available to the debian package universe through some other manual rake-task-esque step?) Why are all the packages called "libGEMNAME-ruby", rather than something that indicates its original src history (as a gem), like "gemGEMNAME-ruby" or "libgemGEMNAME-ruby" or "libgem-GEMNAME-ruby"? or "libGEMNAME-ruby-gem"? I think I understand that the deb packaging/unpackaging system is independent of rubygems entirely, and that the code will be stored somewhere else on the target machines and doesn't assume rubygems exists at all, so does this mean that your rubygems code should never ever have 'require "rubygems"' in it? I saw that the helper page (http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/upstream-devs.html) that the Rakefile shouldn't have this, but if the target system for a gem can no longer be guaranteed to have rubygems installed, then how does it find the other libs at runtime? Do we need to have: begin require 'external-lib-or-gem' rescue LoadError require 'rubygems' require 'external-lib-or-gem' end This idiom used to appear in many projects but seems to be lost to the ravages of time. With rubygems "winning", and with it being included in ruby1.9, I'm sure most people assume it is available and that dependent projects will be available via rubygems and no other mechanism. Does your script simply remove 'require "rubygems"' from any src code or does it just not support this sort of project code? If the gem has 1+ executable apps in it, does it still get packaged with "lib" prefix? The last section of http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/upstream-devs.html says to include a man page with each executable. What do they look like? Does any rubygem currently do this? Can they be auto-generated from some other documentation? Where do you store a man page in a rubygem normally? Does rubygems itself support man pages + their installation on target machines? Could we write scripts that: * tested all gems to see if they are automatically deb packagable? * automatically created deb packages for any new gem release (from rubyforge + github gem servers) after doing any necessary massaging if possible (add the setup.rb file; remove 'require "rubygems" from Rakefile + src; etc) * run a cron script to run the above Or are you guys already doing this? Does the project have to be on debian's svn server or can it be broken into code + packages separate git repos, etc? (probably related to questions above) More questions about the project's structure: In the 'tools' subfolder, I assume the following is the main app? $ svn list svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-ruby-extras/tools/ruby-pkg-tools/trunk 1/ bin/ debian/ man/ pkg-ruby-extras.sh pkg-ruby-extras.sources pkg-ruby-extras.team What is this 1/, bin/, debian/, man/ structure? Is there ruby code + ruby tests? Do we have any tests for new packages to ensure that they work? Is this project written in some special debian structure, rather than a traditional ruby structure? That is, is it a project by debian people to bring ruby code into their world, rather than a project by ruby people helping out the debian world? If its the former, does this raise the barrier to entry to ruby developers hoping to assist who can't figure out what is going on in the src code? (that's how I'm feeling now, hence the question) Sorry for all these questions. I guess I just want to know what chunk of the project I can help with, including education of gem developers, so Ruby devs can be good global citizens even if they don't know they are (e.g fix newgem/hoe/bones etc so they generate nice scaffolds) Cheers Nic -- Dr Nic Williams iPhone and Rails consultants - http://mocra.com Fun with iPhone/Ruby/Rails/Javascript - http://drnicwilliams.com * Surf Report for iPhone - http://mocra.com/projects/surfreport/ * -- Dr Nic Williams iPhone and Rails consultants - http://mocra.com Fun with iPhone/Ruby/Rails/Javascript - http://drnicwilliams.com * Surf Report for iPhone - http://mocra.com/projects/surfreport/ * -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
