From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2005-03-04T04:14:35+09:00
Subject: Re: RAA Status & The Problem with Ruby

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 03:56:41 +0900, Lyle Johnson <lyle.johnson@gmail.com> wrote:
> A related problem, which I think had a lot to do with that person, was
> that there was this "rivalry" of sorts set up between the RubyGems
> packaging system and RPA, and although I never saw them as competing
> efforts, it seemed to be the case that one of them had to "win". My
> understanding of the RPA effort was that it had a lot to do with
> quality control issues and was not quite so hung up on the packaging
> approach (as long as the packaging approach was consistent).

While it is certainly true that the RPA team never saw this as a case
of "one has to win," the RubyGems team has moved on the assumption
that eventually the packaging format will be integrated with Ruby at
the core. The RPA team built its own packaging format because of
perceived or actual deficiencies in the model used by RubyGems, and in
some cases, at least, they were correct -- and RubyGems has since
improved.

I personally don't know enough about packaging formats to say for
sure. I do think that it would be beneficial if the RPA packaging team
worked with the RubyGems team to provide a *single* standard packaging
system that could be integrated into Ruby and accepted by Matz. This
would make distribution and deployment much easier in so many ways for
both developers and repackagers that it wouldn't be funny.

I don't think that the two goals are incompatible. I think that how
RubyGems does things could be integrated into how the RPA team has
said it wants to do things (e.g., the RPA team is more focussed on
stable releases of groups of packages than on multiple package
versions being available and independently selectable, but with what
seems to be only a few changes in metadata, this could be made part of
RubyGems).

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca