From: Chad Fowler Date: 2005-03-05T01:24:17+09:00 Subject: Re: RAA Status & The Problem with Ruby On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 01:08:32 +0900, Ben Giddings wrote: > Chad Fowler wrote: > > So, to expand on your original statement, we actually have three > > things (or four): > > > > 1. Package format > > 2. Package repository > > 3. QA / Validation process (RPA) > > 4. Package index (RAA) > > > > I see RubyGems filling the needs of #1 and #2. In fact, I see it > > actually filling those needs for > 200 packages and literally > > thousands of users today. > > Chad, do you think it's possible to combine what RPA wanted to offer, > and what RubyGems wanted to offer? For instance, to maybe be able to > tag RubyGems packages as being "stable" and "unstable". Packages tagged > as "stable" would have passed the RPA QA process, by default everything > else would go in "unstable"? > Definitely. There has been much discussion about this. Search ruby-talk for an exhausting several hours of reading :) You wouldn't really need to even do the stable/unstable thing. It would be possible to create a super-gem ("gems-quality-assured" or something) that has all of the known good versions as dependencies. That would at least get the good ones on your system. If you _only_ installed the super-gem, you would in effect have a full local installation of someone's known-good list. This could be done without any changes to RubyGems at all. What it _wouldn't_ give you is the ability to patch the libraries, which the RPA people were doing with some of the libs they were touching. You'd have to depend on the traditional send-patch-and-wait method of getting patches into a library. > Do you think the different approach to packaging / format of the > packages is a matter of concern? Maybe the standard "Gem" format could > be one of a few different "renderings" of the package. That way, you > could also "render" as a .rpm or as a .deb or an RPA package. > Doing this with Rake would be ideal. Personally, as long as there is a universally available format with a _lot_ of libraries to be had, I'd be happy. As of now, RubyGems is filling that role to a great extent. If people want to create .rpm, .deb, and .rpa packages, that's also great. I just want it to be easy to find and install Ruby stuff. These days, it's much much easier than it was two years ago. And it keeps getting better and better. > I'd love to see the QA aspect of RPA combined with the repository / > format aspect of RubyGems. I also think that if there were "one true > approach" to packaging Ruby libs and apps, it would bring people (like > me) in from the sidelines to start actively using one or the other. I like the QA aspect, too, though it's obviously not my focus. I'm not interested in helping to build a QA repository at all. Not because it's not a valuable thing to have, but because it doesn't fit the kind of thing I like to do. If someone wants to lead a team to QA (including providing patches) a bunch of apps and libraries to build a "validated" RubyGems repository, I would both applaud it and do what I can to support it. I'm sure the other RubyGems developers would say the same. -- Chad Fowler http://chadfowler.com http://rubycentral.org http://rubygarden.org http://rubygems.rubyforge.org (over 100,000 gems served!)