[DRE-maint] Regarding your comment in my blog (re: Ruby Gems)

Gunnar Wolf gwolf at gwolf.org
Tue Dec 9 15:57:14 UTC 2008


Hi,

I got the following message posted on my blog, as a comment on one of
my posts regarding Ruby/Debian cultures [1].

Anyway - I think this comment should reach the group.

Dr. Nic: Debian is far from homogeneous. I cannot by far describe you
the interactions we have in here, but I feel this is mostly a
loosely-knit group, where we basically share some tools and
procedures, and have an ocassional discussion on what is best and what
way should we do something so it scales... You can check on the
mailing list archives [2], you will see there is very little traffic
there (and most of it is automatic mails notifying us about newer
versions).

There is no "official Debian stand", as we cannot speak for Debian as
a whole, just of us as a group - Not all Ruby packages are maintained
by us (perhaps most noticeably, Rails is not). We just have a little
bunch of packages which give us a little bunch of experience :) [3]

Anyway - On to Dr. Nic's comment:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Its great that there is already the pkg-ruby-extras project. I
    only saw it a few minutes ago.

    The page on "things to do to make your gem ready for debian
    packaging" page [4] was very educational. I'm not sure how to
    create the man page it suggests, nor where it goes, but the rest
    was useful. I guess newgem will need to start generating the
    setup.rb file again (it was recently removed as there didn't seem
    to be a point to it).

    My instinct is to want to help with this project, though there are
    some immediate barriers to entry that testing the patience of my
    apathy. The project is hosted on svn. The mailing list is an old
    school mailman server [5]. There seems to be no list of "who to
    contact" on the main website, rather on [6]. This is only annoying
    because I failed the basic Internet 1.0 test of "create an
    account" (I can't login after verification).

    I don't like to complain, I just like to help. I shouldn't
    complain, so I am sorry.

    What I'd like to do if someone can help get me started:

    * a "can this gem be converted to a debian bundle" test script to be
      run against all existing gems and all future gems
    * a cron job to automatically convert all passing gems into bundles
      (if their dependencies were successfully converted) except those that
      require special love (those with known external dependencies, I
      guess).
    * move the project to github, the conversations to google groups,
      etc. These are the modern tools of OSS communities afaik.

      Sorry to use your blog post for these comments. Hopefully
      you/someone can help me help sort out this "gems are so evil"
      problem that sysadmin people believe. That would be nice.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

So... People, I expect a nice thread to grow here ;-) We finally have
a nice echo (amidst lots of flaming) from people involved in the Ruby
community, and this can be a great starting point to smooth the
integration, which has by far not been great.

[1] http://gwolf.org/node/1869

[2] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers/

[3] http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/pet.cgi

[4] http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/upstream-devs.html

[5] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-ruby-extras-maintain...

[6] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-ruby-extras/

-- 
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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