Paul van Tilburg wrote:
On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 03:28:01AM +0900, Austin Ziegler wrote:
On 9/20/05, Mauricio Fernández <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Right now, RubyGems represents a step backwards relative to Minero
Aoki's setup.rb in many regards as far as repackagers are concerned.
To be honest, this is one of my *least* worries. I know, Mauricio, that
it matters greatly to you, but I find that RubyGems has solved things in
a manner similar to stow.
But it is our most important worry! As Debian developer this would
increase my amount of work for packaging _and_ maintaining each Ruby
library/app.
Are you actually intending to produce Debian .deb packages for every Gem?
I ask because coming from a Perl background, I've always found Debian's
packaging of CPAN libraries to be incomplete enough to be problematic.
For instance, last time I installed blosxom and some plugins, I had to
go to CPAN for some standard libraries that weren't available as Debian
packages. Once I have to go to CPAN even once, the value of repackaging
the libraries in Debian format is lost--in fact, it becomes a liability.
As others have already mentioned, you quickly end up with competing
versions of the same library.
I expect the situation will ultimately be the same with Ruby. Right now,
it might be feasible to repackage everything from RubyGems to .deb; but
I doubt that will continue to be the case, with an arbitrary number of
people writing Gems, and a small number of Gem to Debian repackagers.
The solution I would like to see would be the one taken by Gentoo for
CPAN--provide a wrapper which incorporates the language's packaging
system in the Linux distribution's packaging system. With Gentoo I run a
script naming a CPAN package, and it builds a portage package for that
CPAN package (or downloads the pre-packaged Portage package if one
exists). That way, both Portage and CPAN agree about what's installed.
Anyhow... I'm making a mental note to release a setup.rb version of my
forthcoming library as well as a Gem...
mathew
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
