Hi, I am forwarding here a conversation I have been maintaining with with Hongli Lai, from Phusion (the great coders that brought us Passenger/mod_rails). I think this can be a great service (although commercial) for some users.
Please excuse and blame me for any unclarity in pasting together several mails here. From: Hongli Lai <[email protected]> Dear Gunnar Wolf, I've recently read your blog posts about RubyGems. Your blog posts have sparked a lot of discussion about this subject. If you're familiar with Ruby/Rails, then you might know us as the authors of Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails. After reading the many discussions on the RubyGems-and-Debian subject, we had decided to develop a RubyGem-to-Apt conversion service. At the time of writing, this service is almost ready to be launched as a public beta, but before we launch we'd like to have feedback from prominent members of the Debian community, such as yourself. Would you be interested in this service? We've deployed a staging version at http://debgem.phusion.nl/ We hope that you can provide us with constructive criticism. With kind regards, Hongli Lai -- Phusion | The Computer Science Company Web: http://www.phusion.nl/ E-mail: [email protected] Chamber of commerce no: 08173483 (The Netherlands) From: Gunnar Wolf <[email protected]> > Dear Gunnar Wolf, > > I've recently read your blog posts about RubyGems. Your blog posts have > sparked a lot of discussion about this subject. > > If you're familiar with Ruby/Rails, then you might know us as the > authors of Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails. After reading the many > discussions on the RubyGems-and-Debian subject, we had decided to > develop a RubyGem-to-Apt conversion service. At the time of writing, > this service is almost ready to be launched as a public beta, but before > we launch we'd like to have feedback from prominent members of the > Debian community, such as yourself. > > Would you be interested in this service? We've deployed a staging > version at http://debgem.phusion.nl/ > We hope that you can provide us with constructive criticism. Hi, Sorry for not answering to you earlier - This looks _really_ nice. Of course, it is a bit sad to me that you are offering this as a commercial service, and we cannot integrate your work to our process, but then again - it is a great service, that I'm sure will help many people. As for myself, I will not be using your service (after all, it takes me only a couple of minutes to create a Ruby package by hand ;-) ), but I will tell others about your service. Still, if some comments are in place: - Most of your users will be used to The Debian Way, as well as to The Rails Way ;-) So, I think most of them will expect to have _something_ in /usr/share/doc/<package> - I think it will be very useful if you include there a small README file, pointing out it is _not_ an official Debian package, and providing a link to your site. Not every user of your packages will be the system adminsitrator, and this will both reduce the number of spurious bugs reported to our system, and get you further publicity ;-) For extra points, you might want to move (or link, or whatever) the READMEs and all to that directory. - I see the layout you are using is quite similar to what Gems would create (if not identical). Looks nice! :) Now, This _will_ need the code to call your modules via gems. The relations between the four packages created for each of them look interesting. Now, possibly you should create links to the place where the latest current package is from one of the depending packages - i.e. have libfoo-ruby1.8 not as an empty package, but providing symlinks from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/foo.rb (and whatever other hierarchies it has) to ./usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/foo.rb. Of course, I suppose you have hashed this ideas quite a bit, but it could be an interesting way to get better interoperation. - When we have Ruby packages including sizeable amounts of documentation, we generate a libfoo-ruby-doc package, with the documentation compiled as HTML. It is also a nice plus to have... Although it _will_ create lots and lots of little packages! Anyway - best luck! Without a deeper revision yet, your project looks _very_ useful. If you allow me, I will share this mail and reply with the rest of the pkg-ruby-extras group. -- Gunnar Wolf - [email protected] - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF From: Hongli Lai <[email protected]> Gunnar Wolf wrote: > Hi, > > Sorry for not answering to you earlier - This looks _really_ nice. Of > course, it is a bit sad to me that you are offering this as a > commercial service, and we cannot integrate your work to our process, > but then again - it is a great service, that I'm sure will help many > people. > > As for myself, I will not be using your service (after all, it takes > me only a couple of minutes to create a Ruby package by hand ;-) ), > but I will tell others about your service. Hi. I'm glad to see that you had a good impression. Your feedback and support is much appreciated. :) > Still, if some comments are in place: > > - Most of your users will be used to The Debian Way, as well as to The > Rails Way ;-) So, I think most of them will expect to have > _something_ in /usr/share/doc/<package> - I think it will be very > useful if you include there a small README file, pointing out it is > _not_ an official Debian package, and providing a link to your > site. Not every user of your packages will be the system > adminsitrator, and this will both reduce the number of spurious bugs > reported to our system, and get you further publicity ;-) For extra > points, you might want to move (or link, or whatever) the READMEs > and all to that directory. Very good idea, we'll work on this. > - I see the layout you are using is quite similar to what Gems would > create (if not identical). Looks nice! :) Now, This _will_ need the > code to call your modules via gems. The relations between the four > packages created for each of them look interesting. Now, possibly > you should create links to the place where the latest current > package is from one of the depending packages - i.e. have > libfoo-ruby1.8 not as an empty package, but providing symlinks from > /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/foo.rb (and whatever other hierarchies it has) to > ./usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/foo.rb. Of course, I suppose you have > hashed this ideas quite a bit, but it could be an interesting way to > get better interoperation. Yes we've been thinking about this. Plain symlinks are not guaranteed to work because some gems expect that all files are under the same directory tree. We do have another solution in mind and we intend on implementing this in the future. That said, I think that most Ruby software these days call "require 'rubygems'" before requiring third-party libraries anyway, so I don't think that it's too big of a problem in practice. > - When we have Ruby packages including sizeable amounts of > documentation, we generate a libfoo-ruby-doc package, with the > documentation compiled as HTML. It is also a nice plus to > have... Although it _will_ create lots and lots of little packages! Just curious, is it really necessary to package documentation separately? From what I've seen, most people don't really care whether the download is a little larger as long as it's easy. > Anyway - best luck! Without a deeper revision yet, your project looks > _very_ useful. If you allow me, I will share this mail and reply with > the rest of the pkg-ruby-extras group. Please feel free to share the email, though I should note that http://debgem.phusion.nl/ is just the staging version. The final version will be deployed on http://www.debgem.com/ We'll send you an email when we've launched. Thanks. :) With kind regards, Hongli Lai -- Phusion | The Computer Science Company Web: http://www.phusion.nl/ E-mail: [email protected] Chamber of commerce no: 08173483 (The Netherlands) From: Gunnar Wolf <[email protected]> Hongli Lai dijo [Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 08:55:42PM +0100]: > (...) > >- I see the layout you are using is quite similar to what Gems would > > create (if not identical). Looks nice! :) Now, This _will_ need the > > code to call your modules via gems. The relations between the four > > packages created for each of them look interesting. Now, possibly > > you should create links to the place where the latest current > > package is from one of the depending packages - i.e. have > > libfoo-ruby1.8 not as an empty package, but providing symlinks from > > /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/foo.rb (and whatever other hierarchies it has) to > > ./usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/foo.rb. Of course, I suppose you have > > hashed this ideas quite a bit, but it could be an interesting way to > > get better interoperation. > > Yes we've been thinking about this. Plain symlinks are not > guaranteed to work because some gems expect that all files are under > the same directory tree. We do have another solution in mind and we > intend on implementing this in the future. Ok, I see... Still, this deserves some thinking IMHO. Now, is that a good thing? Yes, I know symlinks don't exist in Windowsland, but breakage upon finding a symlink... Smells like a bug to me. And yes, if I didn't make myself clear, I was suggesting linking all files (well, all .rb files - but if more are needed, every file could be linked). > That said, I think that most Ruby software these days call "require > 'rubygems'" before requiring third-party libraries anyway, so I > don't think that it's too big of a problem in practice. And you can anyway state that you should "require rubygems" whenever you use any gems on this project, yes. However, the Ruby world is much larger than Rails, and there is a very large amount of code still around from before Rails came into the spotlight. Gems are IMHO (but you know Ruby's ways much better than me!) mostly a hack to allow for Rails' idiosincracy to work with the strange mix of environments it is usually used on... If you take oldish (but still working, probably still under development) Ruby code, you will find many places where things are 'require'd without any mention of Gems. I think this would aid a wider adoption... > >- When we have Ruby packages including sizeable amounts of > > documentation, we generate a libfoo-ruby-doc package, with the > > documentation compiled as HTML. It is also a nice plus to > > have... Although it _will_ create lots and lots of little packages! > > Just curious, is it really necessary to package documentation > separately? From what I've seen, most people don't really care > whether the download is a little larger as long as it's easy. Umh... Well, sometimes you want to install the documentation without installing the rest of the package, or viceversa. Sometimes size does matter - Especially when you have to take into account embedded systems or the like. As an example, look at libpdf-writer-ruby1.8 and libpdf-writer-ruby-doc - They are 200 and 860K respectively. If you are installing on a device with 256MB of disk space (think, installing on a USB key or on an appliance), almost 1MB _is_ sizeable. Although, yes, usually the savings are not _that_ great. Anyway, the generated HTML could be inside the package that generated it. We also do it when it is not worth the separation. > >Anyway - best luck! Without a deeper revision yet, your project looks > >_very_ useful. If you allow me, I will share this mail and reply with > >the rest of the pkg-ruby-extras group. > > Please feel free to share the email, though I should note that > http://debgem.phusion.nl/ is just the staging version. The final > version will be deployed on http://www.debgem.com/ We'll send you an > email when we've launched. Great! Thanks, -- Gunnar Wolf - [email protected] - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF Having said that... I am moving over the conversation to this list. I am sure many more people can comment on the service much better than myself. Hongli and the people at Phusion are more than interested in getting our points of view, and are very open to comments. This mail made me very happy! Sometimes complaining leads to a good change ;-) -- Gunnar Wolf - [email protected] - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF _______________________________________________ Pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers
