Re: RubyGems, upstream releases and idempotence of packaging

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Mauricio Fern疣dez wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 02:40:33AM +0900, Hugh Sasse wrote:
> > Good strong, clear arguments there. 
> > I'm in favour of this for your stated reasons, but I have a
> > question:  Does this mean that binary gems would be impossible?  
> > Or at least forbidden?  Some packages are distributed for windows
> > only, which saves on download size, disk space....
> 
> Binary .gem packages are very useful and there's no problem at all with
> them being available, they're are equivalent to any other binary package

OK.

> out there. There's obviously a problem with binary-only releases if we
> don't distribute the code too ;-) [I'm assuming we're considering an
> open development process, as happens with all the RubyGems packages on
> RubyForge and probably with the overwhelming majority of the RubyGems
> packages in use)].

Yes, agreed.  I wasn't thinking about never releasing the sources
:-)
> 
> > (I'm not sure about "idempotence" being the right word as you can't
> 
> Yes, I abused the word; I referred to "idempotence of the packaging
> process" meaning that I can "repackage" the code from a .gem package to

Oh, OK then. That's clearer, thanks.
> 
> > > [1] One can extract the data with 
> > >    
> > >  tar Oxf foo-0.0.1.gem data.tar.gz | (mkdir foo-0.0.1 && tar -C foo-0.0.1 -zxf -)
> > > 
> > I'm not sure I understand that: you are extracting data.tar.gz from the gem
        [...]
> 
> The above command would extract the contents of the data.tar.gz file
> contained in the "outer tarball" (foo-0.0.1.gem) under the foo-0.0.1/
> directory.

Thanks.
> 
> > > The "nested tarball" format was inspired by Debian's .deb format. The latter
> > 
> > Can you point me at something which explains the point of nesting?
> > I've not clicked.  
> 
> I don't know of any such resource, but here are the pros I can think of:
        [Excellent points]
You've convinced me. Thank you.
> 
        Hugh