From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2005-03-15T10:44:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Codefest Grant - RubyGems cleanup and enhancement

On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 09:11:07AM +0900, James Edward Gray II wrote:
> This is not meant as an attack.  I'm asking an honest question, 
> hopefully of the RPA developers.  Is the RPA still under active 
> development?  It seems to have slipped off the public radar.  (Or 
> perhaps it's just my radar.)

The port/package manager (rpa-base) and the incipient infrastructure
(repository, VCS, wiki) are unsatisfactory under our (admittedly severe)
criteria. They will undergo major restructuring.
Had they been deemed adequate, RPA would have been proposed for
widespread public consumption long ago, but it was in a testing phase
for a reason.

As for

eric> Combining RPA and Gems is probably not going to be done during our
eric> Codefest.

and

ben> Is there any chance you could start this process a little bit?  Choose
ben> some of the main features of RPA that are missing from RubyGems and find
ben> a way of integrating them?

Comparing RubyGems to RPA is akin to assimilating rpm to FreeBSD. It
doesn't really make that much sense. I understand that you mean one of
(1) RubyGems (the installer) could take some features from rpa-base
(2) RubyGems (the project) could grow in scope and try to reach some of
    the goals expressed by RPA (making it a sort of RPAlite?)

Regarding (1), some things like proper DATADIR support, installation
into sitelibdir, transparent operation, compatibility with native tools,
etc. are hardly doable in RubyGems due to some fundamental implementation
choices.

As for (2), it is hard to tell which are exactly RubyGems' goals because
AFAIK there is no public manifesto comparable to 
http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?RpaManifesto

I would really appreciate if Chad, Jim, Gavin, ..., clarified the
situation. Especially since there have been some talks as of late about
RubyGems replacing RAA altogether, RubyGems being the only repository
for Ruby software, etc.

I'm looking forward to the results of this codefest. Happy hacking to
the Seattle.rb brigade :) I'm very interested in the outcome of that
event, for I don't really know how effective codefests can be in
practice. Since I know the problem space ((re)packaging) and the
concerned codebase (RubyGems) fairly well, I hope I'll be able to draw
some conclusions.

-- 
Hassle-free packages for Ruby?
RPA is available from http://www.rubyarchive.org/