[DRE-maint] Call for review: new version of "Position on rubygems"

[Lucas Nussbaum]

(reorganizating your mail a bit since point 1 is split in two places --
don't take offense :P)

On 24/02/09 at 10:17 -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> On your re-writing of the pages: I agree with the general
> spirit. However, maybe we should move a bit more, given the evolution
> in Rubyland. We have so far requested authors not to package as gems,
> and I recognize it as a (good!) sign of acknowledging the reality that
> you switch it to "package your Gems, but also provide a
> .tar.gz". However... A gem is much like a .deb, in that it is an
> archive containing a tarball and metadata (data.tar.gz and
> metadata.gz). And although data.tar.gz unpacks on the current
> directory, I guess we could save quite a bit of animosity by handling
> gems as we handle a regular orig.tar.gz.
[..]
> Back on the first point: I can see two possible approaches. The first
> one would be repacking gems as tarballs (which could be done with a
> very simple script), but we would lose the pristine source. On the
> other hand, we could fiddle around with dpkg (I have to confess I am
> completely unfamiliar with the dpkgv3 format, so I am only assuming
> this is possible as AFAIR it solves the tarball-in-a-tarball
> situation) to accept gems as orig.tar.gz. 

I don't think that we should do that.
1/ technical reason: it's dirty, whatever hack we manage to use.
2/ philosophical reasons:
   - one of the root problems is that rubygems is taking too much
     place in the ruby community. After all, it's just a
     ruby-specific way to distribute libraries. It hurts when I hear
     people calling libraries "gems", as in "is there a gem to do that
     thing?". Let's show people that use can still distribute libs
     without using rubygems.
   - distributing clean archives is not hard, and asking upstreams to do
     that forces them to do a small step towards us. I think that it's
     good to ask for that step.

> Same thing goes regarding setup.rb - Very few Ruby projects ship it
> nowadays, and it is largely irrelevant. But we have it packaged in
> Debian, and it usually Just Works(tm). Maybe we should encourage not
> to use any interesting layouts which break assumptions...

I agree that the point is that upstreams use the standard layout.
However, the best way to force them into doing that (and doing it
properly) is to ask them to provide a setup.rb and test that their libs
install correctly with it.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
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