Thanks Ken! That was really helpful. I guess I have to wait until Kushal and my mentor give me a go. I will be packaging a few gems anyway. So, I will be reading all the doc and wiki available, so far I have been pointed to these:

1. isitfedoraruby
2. Infrastructure/AppBestPractices
3. Packaging:Guidelines
4. Packaging:Ruby

Let me know if I am missing out on any other important resource.

Aditya

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 2:08 AM, Ken Dreyer <ktdreyer@ktdreyer.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Aditya Prakash
<aditya.prakash132@gmail.com> wrote:
> How
> important it is that gems I am using have rpm available? A good amount of
> development time will be wasted in packaging if this is a requirement.

I've had to take a break from Rails packaging for a while since I
switched jobs, but I still maintain several rubygems with the hope
that I'll be able to do more Ruby/Rails packaging eventually. But I've
been working at it for years, and you're right, packaging each gem
individually is a mountain of work.

Quick wins are important in a project as big as what you're
discussing, and when packaging gem-by-gem, it's easy to get bogged
down. If I were you, I'd break GlitterGallery down into more
manageable steps:

Phase 1) Create an RPM that more-or-less follows all the packaging
guidelines, but bundles all its dependencies. You can build/ship this
RPM via Copr.

Phase 2) Switch your application from using Bundler to using
https://rubygems.org/gems/bundler_ext

Phase 3) Start dropping your bundled gems one by one and use the
system gems instead.

In hindsight I wish that I had taken this approach with Gitorious or
Gitlab, instead of only starting at the base of the dependency tree
and working my way upwards. It's probably good to work from both
directions at once. But starting at the top, with the app itself, will
give you the satisfaction and internal motivation of having something
that works today, even if it's not up to Fedora's standards.

> Also, how important it is that rpm package are available for ruby gems in
> general? In name of being a ruby developer and part of fedora community I
> would like to package a few important ones.

From my own experience, I've found that packaging gems in Fedora is a
good excuse for learning Ruby, Bundler, Rubygems, Minitest, Rspec, and
other parts of the Ruby ecosystem that touch on packaging.

- Ken
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