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Re: RubyGems in Ruby HEAD



Hi! 

I'm another, less involved, Debian ruby lib maintainer. Of all the things
that have been tossed around in this thread so far, I see these two as
being the really interesting ones:

On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 03:56:00PM +0200, Paul van Tilburg wrote:
> Ok.  Some concrete stuff then.  
> * Upstream should only have to create a spec file, not change stuff in
>   the code, let 'require "foo"' stay 'require "foo"'. 

This is the big one for me. The packaging stuff is metadata and should
remain separate from the code. Granted, as a packager I could simply route
around this by patching every single ruby lib I package, but it's still an
ugly implementation that makes life annoying. 

I haven't looked in to the actual gems implementation in a few months, so
the details are sketchy in my memory, but is there a way of keeping the
code and packaging metadata separate that wouldn't break the existing gems
implementation?

Better yet, does anyone remember a thread where this sort of thing has been
discussed in concrete terms?

> * Create a mapping from gems to libs.  This way, we _can_ include
>   RubyGems into Debian without problems.  The user can get libs that
>   haven't been packaged yet or newer versions but is warned when gems
>   are installed overriding a lib that already has been installed via
>   dpkg and vice versa. 
>   This probably sound much more easy than it is, and it's also
>   more of a workaround.

I don't necessarily expect the gems guys to handle this, but if it were
handled by the gems packagers themselves it would potentially solve a lot
of issues. Austin obviously speaks for those developers who want complete
control over their code, and giving them the ability to do this would
definitely make repackagers' lives a lot easier. 

Would a simple field in the gemspec that we could parse automatically
handle this well enough? If not, what else do we need?

 - David Nusinow



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