[DRE-maint] On CDBS and packaging gems

[Gunnar Wolf]

Hi,

I've been reviewing the excellent work Filipe has invested in
packaging Mongrel - I just started with a very simplistic packaging,
and he has done quite a bit of polishing/documenting, getting the work
more in line with the rest of the pkg-ruby-extras team work. Now, one
of the things he did is to rework my debian/rules to use CDBS -
Compare revisions 1258 and 1263 [1].

Now, packaging Gems is not such a hassle after all - Gems are
basically tarball-in-a-tarball, precisely one of the motivations that
brought CDBS to life (somehow, using
/usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/tarball.mk). If we manage our patches via
dpatch (as we are doing), it should not be too hard to properly take
care of them. After extracting the tarball-in-a-tarball, we can
perfectly call our usual
/usr/share/ruby-pkg-tools/1/class/ruby-setup-rb.mk CDBS class to do
the work. Only there is a problem: The order in which operations are
done. Look at the package resulting from our tree: 

gwolf at mosca:~/cvs/pkg-ruby-extras/packages-wip/mongrel$ ls -l build-area/
total 384
-rw-r--r-- 1 gwolf gwolf 155332 2007-03-15 10:18 mongrel_1.0.1-1.diff.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 gwolf gwolf    472 2007-03-15 10:18 mongrel_1.0.1-1.dsc
-rw-r--r-- 1 gwolf gwolf    792 2007-03-15 10:18 mongrel_1.0.1-1_i386.changes
-rw-r--r-- 1 gwolf gwolf  56468 2007-03-15 10:18 mongrel_1.0.1-1_i386.deb
-rw-r--r-- 2 gwolf gwolf 156486 2007-03-15 09:24 mongrel_1.0.1.orig.tar.gz

The .diff.gz is basically the whole orig.tar.gz - Why? Because the
step just _before_ building the source package (dpkg-source -b
mongrel-1.0.1) is unpacking the tarball-in-a-tarball. This step should
_follow_ dpkg-source -b. In fact, I don't know why it makes sense to
build the source package _after_ calling setup.rb - It just happens so
because that's what the CDBS rules mandate.

And the problem is? Quite simply, I'm still baffled trying to find out
how to work with CDBS. I have found out the right targets for several
points in the process, but cannot just hit the right spot.

So, in short: As a first step, I need help from you CDBS gurus to
properly build Mongrel without a 155KB diff.gz

As a second step, I'm sure the solution will be quite generic, and can
be converted into a /usr/share/ruby-pkg-tools/1/class/ruby-gem.mk or
similar CDBS class. And although we officially Do Not Like Gems, we
will be much better equipped to convert them into nice Debian packages
;-)

So, who said "ok, I'll do it"?

Greetings,

[1] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-ruby-extras/packages-wip/mongrel/trunk/debian/rules?op=log&rev=0&sc=0&isdir=1

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf at gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973  F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
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