Sending to packaging(a)lists.fp.o where this belongs. On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 05:27:06PM -0500, Mo Morsi wrote: There's a lot of justification in the ticket. There's various pieces. * The historical ruby/gem guidelines are a huge hack that FPC approved because it seemed that gems wouldn't work with the normal separation of %prep %build %install. The recent draft showed that this is no longer the case. * Proper separation allows rpmbuild -b[pci] --shortcircuit to work properly. * The previous guidelines actually didn't allow patching. The original proposed draft guidelines ended up being overly complex as they had separate cases for gem, gem w/ C extension, patched gem, patched gem w/ C extension, patched gem w/ C extension that fails to build. This strategy has a single way to handle all of this. The cost is three extra lines which are easy to conceptualize and explain. (unpacking the code from an archive, then assembling the code into a form that can be built from). * Proper separation of the steps allows people new to ruby packaging but old hands at rpm packaging (a large portion of reviewers) to come to understand the basics of packaging rubygems. In the old guidelines, rubygems were distinct from plain ruby packages. This was because at the time they were written: require 'rubylibrary' imported a plain ruby library and: gem_require 'rubylibrary' The had wholly different syntax at the source code level. The piece of vondruch's draft that stated that non-gem subpackages were no longer needed for gem packages lead me to find that the rubygems package now sets up the ruby library path so that "require 'rubylibrary'" works for both gems and nongems. With that change, we don't need to package all ruby libraries in a non-gem version and the need to have separate requires and provides lessens. (The caveat here is that ruby code would need to have require 'rubygems' somewhere early in its code but if that's considered sufficiently compatible for one of these cases, then it's sufficient for both cases) When might you absolutely need to use Require: rubygem()? I know of the specific case when you are requiring a specific version of code via:: gem 'rubylibrary' I also imagine that there's ways that ruby code can make use of the metadata that gems provide but I don't know how to detect those. In either of those cases, the rubygem() require would seem to be most appropriate. When might you want to use the Require ruby() version? When a package's code uses plain "require 'rubylibrary'", it would work whether the rpm package is shipping a rubygem or a plain ruby library. Therefore, if the packager dosn't want to guess whether we're shipping the relevant library as a rubygem or as a non-gem ruby library, they should be able to do a simple "Requires: ruby(library)". If the packager knows that we package that pacticular library as a rubygem, they can use the rubygem() version of the requires instead but they are no longer required to in this case. So I think answering your question, whether the dependency is satisfied by a gem or non-gem library is no longer of interest in the simple case of a script or piece of code using "require 'rubylibrary'". For places where it does matter, the Guideline should require using Requires: rubygem() (if you have a list of other things to look for, that could be added to flesh out that section). I'm not sure I understand this. Are you referring to the draft guideline that vondruch originally proposed with the many separate pages or the changes that I have been making to have only a single case? The single case does the gem unpack, patch, rebuild (via gem install), and finally install via mkdir/cp/mv. I've forked this to this page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Toshio/RubyPackagingDraft for now so that people can better see what that proposal looks like. I'll have to keep the two pages in sync for a bit until someone does or does not bring up a rubygem where the reduced-complexity guidelines are as direly broken as people are claiming. Nice. Can you specify what versions of Fedora that will be operable on? It's nice to note things like that in the Guidelines. So -- vondruch seems to have issues with this. Code doesn't seem to be entirely interpreter independent? Or rather, only certain code is? The FPC really needs to understand this portion of the issue better as it affects things like where the directories belong in the FHS, whether it makes sense to share rubygems across interpreters and whether it makes sense to share vendorlib or vendorarch across interpreters. Example srpms are the best way to make clear what's happening here :-). Note that when you talk about this being possibly something for later releases -- unfortunately, that seems to be an underlying assumption of the draft guidelines that we were presented with so we need to be able to get correct the parts that make sense. I've finalized this. heh :-) Unfortunately, I don't believe we've had a ruby person on the FPC since lutter (who came up with the original guidelines). So if examples and explanations of arguments are desired, I'll need to recieve them from people who use ruby. Unless someone can present examples where this doesn't work that aren't flaws with upstream code, this is likely to become the way to do things. Yeah -- this was in the portion of the guidelines to be replaced. In my draft, I've simply removed that section (as it's already in the previous section where I renamed it $REQUIRE_PATHS with a comment about where $REQUIRE_PATHS comes from) -Toshio