From: John W Higgins <wishdev@...>
Date: 2010-03-19T06:44:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Recommended way to install Rubygems

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Good Afternoon,

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 1:07 PM, Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net>wrote:

> With ruby libraries:
> - it is usually difficult to find a usable source. Sometimes we have to
>  extract the gem and convert it to a tgz. We also have a service
>  (githubredir.debian.net) that allows us to fetch a specific tag on
>  github as a .tgz.
>

I'm rather confused by this - a gem file (at least as far as I can find)
contains two files data.tar.gz and metadata.tar.gz within the tar.gz shell
of the .gem file - what exactly is the issue with that layout? Is there
something specific that this doesn't provide you that is of great
importance?


> - then we often have to modify the source, to remove the calls to
>  "require 'rubygems'"
>

I'm pretty sure that's a one liner for 99.9% of cases and I really don't
think is necessary - you really should look at how Gentoo installs gems
because we get the benefit of both "manually" installing a package as well
as full integration within RubyGems (for example gem list --local shows all
gems installed via portage and well as gem install). If there is no ebuild
file we can infact turn to emerge-gem to take a gem file and create an
ebuild (including full dependency checks from the gem itself). Does it work
every single time - nope - but it seems like a huge improvement over what is
going on with Debian at the moment.


> - then we have to find a way to install the files. If the directory
>  structure uses the setup.rb standard (bin/, lib/, etc...), then it's
>  easy, and we use our own copy of setup.rb to install everything.
>  But some libraries don't ship the files in a very organized way.
>

Again, you keep seeming to want to continue to take shot after shot at
developers when clearly it's an issue with the ability of Debian to have any
flexibility - again looking at Gentoo it somehow, in a very much automated
fashion, manages to handle all these wild and wacky libraries.

In fact you might want to look at Gentoo as a way to create sources packages
because it seems to handle all your issues and will present a nice simple
tar.bz2 package of the files that might be much easier to work with in
regards to your need for standardization. And I'm truly not saying that to
be an idiot or anything - it really seems like Gentoo has solved the issues
you are having, at least with respect to getting the files into some form of
a constant layout which may be of great help to you.

John

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