From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2005-09-22T09:15:46+09:00 Subject: Re: RubyGems TODO On 9/21/05, David A. Black wrote: > To the extent that repackaging is an issue (which I have my doubts > about, but anyway), I don't think it's Linux-specific. For some > reason Debian always seems to come to the fore in these discussions, > but the issues raised (and the question of their [ir]relevance to a > packaging system for Ruby projects) is pretty broad-based. Agreed. The question is sometimes raised whether some projects -- especially compiled projects -- should have Win32 installers, as has been done with the win32-utils package. Similarly, I believe it only helped Instiki when David was able to offer a dpkg for MacOS X. That said, I *don't* think it's an issue and believe that it could be handled by simply calling gem install/uninstall as appropriate. It might be desirable to have a way of "signing" such installs so that it's *hard* to uninstall them except through the native installer, but the reality is that -- for most things -- RubyGems is *very good* at what it does, and I do not believe that it will take much to make it more suitable. > > What if a gem could be treated like a tarball? Like you run `gem extract > > RMagick-0.2.6.gem' and you're left with a directory containing the > > distribution and a `gem-setup.rb' which could do the work of handling > > gem-related installation tasks while leaving the library distribution open to > > patching and custom installation? > Yeah, that's pretty broad-based :-) It's got to be something that > general, since someone working on a Ruby project really can't be > expected to be answerable to arbitrarily many repackaging > philosophies. And to be perfectly clear, I won't be. If it isn't obvious, I vehemently disagree with the Debian packaging philosophy and am at best neutral about the rest of them. I have a lot of reasons, most of which I've aired in the last few hours. But what is clear is that I will be providing .gem and .tar.gz with setup.rb installations for the packages that I maintain and that I *personally* expect repackagers to work *with* me before patching my work because it's *my* name out there, not theirs. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca