From: Eivind Eklund Date: 2004-10-05T20:09:10+09:00 Subject: Re: RubyGems and RPA Association disclaimer: I'm the original architect of the RPA vision (with Mauricio being the one having done most of the work and that should have most of the credit). I'm also trying to help RubyGems get the best possible system, and believe that if both systems are well architected they will serve different roles (RPA for production, RubyGems for zero-delay packages) and form a symbiosis. On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 08:38:48 +0900, Bill Atkins wrote: > RPA and RubyGems both solve the same problem (automatic > installation of Ruby packages and their dependencies), Yes and no. RPA attempts to solve a broader problem than this: Making packages available in a form where they are useable in production. Automatic installation is one part of this, but another part of it is to keep the packages available over time, and provide a point of contact for patches so the packages are maintained over time. You can see the RPA manifesto here: http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?RpaManifesto In accordance with this, RPA also tries to provide various documentation that helps its goal. Examples are http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?PackageAdvisor (for finding the packages you need for production), http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?GoodAPIDesign (helping the libraries we package be the best they can), and http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?GoodPractices (documenting what practices makes it easy for us and other packagers). As a courtesy to other packagers, RPA also has as a goal that it should be possible to repackagage RPA packages in e.g. Debian or FreeBSD. RubyGems attempts to solve the problem of letting authors create packages. Information about how to package etc is available at http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl For future directions, RubyGems has http://onestepback.org/articles/rubygemsfacets/possiblerubygemsdirections.html RubyGems are presently somewhat troublesome to repackage (due to containing too little policy to be able to fit with requirements from other systems - the problems are directory structure and require_gem), but this will hopefully be fixed in the future, as a part of RubyGems goal of being the "standard" packaging system for authors (and the only release they need to do.) For the time being, repackagers request that developers also release as .tar.gz or similar. Eivind.