[DRE-maint] Team goals

[Paul van Tilburg]

Hello everyone, 

With 77 packages now maintained by the team[1], I can say that we have
succeeded in packaging a lot of libraries and applications.  I also
think that the quality is quite high and I hope you think so too.  :)
We also have created the libruby-extras packages, another goal that we
have met in the latest stable release.  Discussing with Lucas and Duck
on FOSDEM 2008 have made me realise that we need new goals.  Most of
them are known to most of us, but it might be good to formulate them
anyway.

I propose the following team goals (in no particular order)

1) Full documentation support.

 For me, the usefulness of a library stands or falls with the
 availability of good documentation.  While the documentation may be
 present in the source, we need to export this and put it in standard
 places.  This means:
  - Install upstream or generated RDoc HTML documentation in
    /usr/share/doc/lib<foo>-ruby/rdoc/.
  - Install upstream or generated RDoc RI documentation.  This might
    involve patching ri and devising a good system to do this.
  - Registering all documentation with doc-base!

2) RubyGems support.
 
 RubyGems exists, there is no way we can keep ignoring it.  Any lanuage
 is prone to develope something CPAN/CTAN/...-like at some point anyway.
 IMO we need to adapt our position statement and approach the issue from
 the following three aspects:

  * Packagers:  This is us.  We have issues with the whole system and
    these are very clear to us.  We need to work with the RubyGems
    devs and other distribution to solve the issues.
  * Developers:  People developing Ruby libs/apps will use gems, either
    because or library debs are behind or because there are simple not
    available.  The rubygems package is already available in Debian,
    though we need to iron some problems out IIRC.
  * Users:  IMO, Debian users use apps available in Debian, which should
    not involve RubyGems at all.  Only if the app uses some plugin
    system via RubyGems this might be useful.

3) Multiple interpreter support.
  
 Although we seem to be able to support multiple Ruby interpreter, this
 does not really work that well.  Take for example JRuby or Ruby 1.9. 
 At the moment, we ignore jruby alltogether and there are only a few
 -ruby1.9 lib packages.  Besides that, we keep having the problem of
 this whole -rubyX.Y package clutter.  It has been suggested to follow
 the Python and or Perl way or a combination.
 I know we have to do this with all Debian/Ruby devs, but as a team we
 can push for changes.

I don't know which of these goals should be our Lenny release goals or
something, but... we should try to work towards the three goals as hard
as we can and we'll see where we end up.

I would very much welcome your thoughts, comments or ideas!

Kind regards,
Paul

1: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org&comaint=yes

-- 
PhD Student @ Eindhoven                     | email: paulvt at debian.org
University of Technology, The Netherlands   | JID: paul at luon.net
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