From: Aredridel <aredridel@...>
Date: 2003-05-08T09:24:20+09:00
Subject: Re: A wishlist for a "Ruby Standard Library"

On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 07:27, Jim Greer wrote:
> [ I've had my morning coffee and I'm feeling a bit verbose... bear with
> me. ]

Pardon my somewhat off-topic reply, but package management is something
I'm passionate about.

> Just out of curiousity: anybody else here running ruby on Debian?

I'm not running Debian at the moment, but PLD is as close as you get
with RPMs.

> I run both Debian and some RPM based distros.  One of the things that
> Debian seems to do a better job of, IMO, is splitting up packages and
> arranging access to stable and development versions simultaneously.

That's something that's important when packaging: fine granularity helps
keep dependencies manageable, and the ability to revert to a stable
version helps immensely.

PLD only ships REXML, mysql and postgres and the ruby core.  I aim to
fix that ;-)

> I'm not necessarily advocating the use of .deb's as a distribution
> method anymore than I advocate RPMs as a general purpose method.  I do
> think, though, that Debian offers useful clues as to how to separate and
> bundle bits o' ruby.

Definately -- that's what I intend to do with PLD.


> As another example of packaging of language/extensions/libraries, see
> 
> 	http://www.jpackage.org/  
> 
> A project which packages Java.  They have an interesting problem; how to
> produce packages for which they do not have the right to distribute the
> underlying source or .jar.  To solve it, they produce source packages
> the require the user to download the associated source tar ball.  They
> then automate the building of binary packages based on the source.

Aye, same as PLD does for the win32codec package.  Ugly, but it works...

> Sounds good in practice, though there are still rough edges.  They are
> currently in the midst of some kind of packaging transition
> (versioning??), which has inteferred with one's ability to install some
> packages (e.g. tomcat4).  [ And, they use an apt-like mechanism to
> manage RPMS, but do not produce debs..... makes you want to go "huh?" ]
> 
> 
> > > 3. I also think that the contents of the RAA should be kept
> > > on the RAA site itself, instead of (in addition to?) keeping
> > > pointers to other sites. 
> > 
> > Yes.  And mirrors.  (And I'm not talking about emulating
> > prdownloads.sourceforge.net here, which is the /worst/ way to do it)
> 
> Again, apt-get provides a useful example here.  By default, the normal
> apt-get sources round-robin DNS to a set of mirrors, so that the user is
> unaware of this issue.

Oooh, round-robin DNS would be great for that!

Ari