From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2004-10-06T17:41:12+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] session-2.1.8

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 01:24:50PM +0900, Ara.T.Howard@noaa.gov wrote:
>   This message is in MIME format.  The first part should be readable text,
>   while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools.

> On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, [iso-8859-1] "Pe�a, Botp" wrote:
> 
> >Ara.T.Howard [mailto:Ara.T.Howard@noaa.gov] wrote:
> >
> >>URLS: |
> >>
> >>   http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/session/
> >>   http://www.codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/session/
> >>
> >
> >looks great. do you have an rpa for this?
> 
> long answer:
> 
>   i have, on my TODO list, reading up on that and learning how to use it.

There's only little documentation about how to package using rpa-base.
There are two reasons for that:
* I am willing to do most (all) of the packaging myself (*)
* rpa-base is subject to possible changes that could break
  backwards-compatibility as far as the packaging work is concerned.
  Since we control both the installers and the corresponding packages,
  we can modify them at once to ensure everything just works, but I would
  hate to force those who packaged their sw. with rpa-base to update
  their packages just because I introduced some incompatible change.

In other words, I was trying to protect early adopters from additional
work. Maybe that was excessive, so what about the following statement:

"I will maintain the rpafied install.rb files that are sent to me."

(*) of course, I'd happily accept help for that, but whoever is offering
it would become an RPA developer and would have to accept that he might
occasionally have more work due to changes in rpa-base (in the past
I've only had to update a package due to a change in rpa-base *once*,
but I like to think that I'm free to make rpa-base better w/o causing any
'external pain' :)

>   i'm fine reading up on it myself but if you have any hints ;-)
> short answer:

That said, you can find some information at 
http://rubyarchive.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Developer_Documentation/Introduction_To_Packaging_Using_Rpa_Base

For your reference, here's the rpafied install.rb for session:

require 'rpa/install'

class Install_session < RPA::Install::FullInstaller
    name "session"
    version "2.1.8-1"
    classification Library
    build do
        installdocs %w[HISTORY README TODO VERSION]
        installexamples "samples"
    end
    install do
        skip_default RunUnitTests
    end
    description <<EOF
Library to drive external progams via pipes from Ruby.

Session::* offers a set of class for driving external progams via pipes.  It
offers a significant abstraction over Open3::popen since stdout/stderr can
be processed individually for each command.  Additionally the exit_status of
each command is made available.

Sessions are Thread safe (in the sense that they do not block on io
operations) allowing command spawn from guis to update widgets with output
while running in the background.
EOF
end

As you can see, it's mostly declarative and fairly easy to understand.
It's longer than the corresponding gemspec due to the description:

require 'rubygems'
spec = Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.name = 'session'
  s.version = File.read("VERSION").strip
  s.platform = Gem::Platform::RUBY
  s.summary = "drive Sh, Bash, IDL easily from scripts"
  s.files = Dir['lib/*']
  s.require_path = 'lib'
  s.autorequire = "session"
  s.has_rdoc = true
  s.test_suite_file = "test/session.rb"
  s.author = "Ara T. Howard"
  s.email = "ara.t.howard@noaa.gov"
  s.homepage = "http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/session"
end

if $0==__FILE__
  Gem::Builder.new(spec).build
end



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