[Pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers] Re: RubyGems in Ruby HEAD

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 22/09/05 at 16:47 -0500, mathew wrote:
> Marc Dequènes (Duck) wrote:
> 
> >mathew <DEFANGED_meta at pobox.com> writes:
> > 
> >
> >>Are you actually intending to produce Debian .deb packages for every Gem?
> >>   
> >>
> >
> >Yes we DO for most of them.
> >How do you think the thousands of source packages are maintained in
> >Debian ? Automagically ?
> > 
> >
> 
> I asked if you were intending to produce Debian packages for *every* 
> Gem. You replied that you produce packages for *most* of them. In other 
> words, you didn't really answer my question.
> 
> Are you intending to produce Debian packages for *every* Gem?
> 
> If the answer is "no", then I'd rather you didn't produce packages for 
> *any* of them. Reason being, I want to be able to request any Gem X and 
> get its dependencies Y and Z automatically, without then having two 
> dependency management systems fighting each other.
> 
> I should mention that I'm speaking as someone who uses Debian more than 
> any other Linux distribution.

The problem is that the goal of gems is to help distribute ruby
software. The goal of debian's packaging system is to help distribute
software in general. If user Joe wants to use application A, which
happens to be written in Ruby, he expects it to install using "apt-get
install a", and all dependancies should be installed automatically. How
would this fit with gems ?

Gems are a good thing, but it should ease the life of both ruby
programmers and users of ruby apps. Currently, it doesn't do much for
users of ruby apps who don't want to know their apps are in ruby.

I think the solution to this whole flame war is to find ways to easily
convert a gem to a {Debian,RPM} package, so packagers can package more
apps more easily and provide packages for more ruby software than
currently.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas at nussbaum.fr             GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |