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

Richard Hurt rnhurt at kangaroobox.com
Tue Dec 9 16:19:42 UTC 2008 

OK, I have to echo a few feelings on this as well.  Dr. Nic is right  
in that we are using some old school tools and it is hard to onboard  
new people.  Being a recent CVS convert I can't understand why we are  
still on SVN and not Git.  Is this because the rest of the Debian  
community has not moved to Git yet?  Also, it was *very* hard for me  
to get up to speed on how this group operates and I still don't think  
I'm quite there yet.

  - Is there any thought around moving to Git?
  - Why are we still using mailman and not something more flexible?
  - How can we make it easier to onboard people and projects?

Thanx!
   Richard

BTW: I am still working on getting Redmine packaged up but it seems  
like there is not much Ruby action happening on Debian lately (at  
least there are no SVN commits).  One real reason I haven't been to  
active lately is that I don't want to get in front of Lenny.  I figure  
people are too busy trying to get a release out the door to bother  
them with a new RoR package.  :/

On Dec 9, 2008, at 10:57 AM| Dec 9, 2008, Gunnar Wolf wrote:

> 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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