Hey to start off, anyone that missed it on Fedora Planet should read
Pavol Rusnak's excellent blog post
(
http://stick.gk2.sk/blog/2010/01/gemcutter-opensuse-build-service-coopera...)
about the state of rubygems, specifically with gemcutter becomming the
official rubygems source
(
http://update.gemcutter.org/2009/10/26/transition.html) and the
introduction of the new gemcutter webhook API to register callbacks to
be invoked upon gem updates
(
http://gemcutter.org/pages/api_docs#webhook). Also discussed is
gem2rpm, which automatically converts a gem to a rpm specfile / srpm,
and the need of a tool to bind those two components together.
Introducing Polisher which does just that, a rails based webapp that
allows a user to add any number of gem sources, customize the packages
they want to track, and register handlers to be invoked on certain gem
events. Currently I have handlers to simply send an email, and/or
generate a rpm artifact from the gem, and the interface is extensible
enough so that anyone can add any event handler easily. I am currently
working on a module that will automatically submit a bugzilla request
for the gem/rpm. This will entail a feature akin to the 'dirty bit'
discussed in Pavol's blogpost, for packages that need extra maintenance
before submission, but polisher will still assist in the process in any
case (and its possible we can develop a maintenance automation system
which runs a maintainer's scripts to make changes to the package before
bugzilla submission).
It is still early in development, the current state is the result of
only a few days of coding, but I think it's already useful for the Ruby
-> Fedora process. Lots of things still need to be added, there is
no-multiuser support currently for example, but I'm already able to
register callbacks for gemcutter gems, which upon being updated, get
invoked.
Polisher is a webapp since the gemcutter webhook API takes a http url
which to invoke w/ POST params upon a gem update. Whoever will want to
run this will need a public-facing domain to do so. I put a copy up on
my personal domain, feel free to give it a try, just please don't try to
stress test it ;-) (and forgive the simplistic interface, was going for
functional/quick).
http://projects.morsi.org/polisher/demo
At some point, if this takes off, it would be awesome to get some
hosting space for the Fedora community, and to setup an automated
Ruby->Fedora workflow engine, w/ maintainer intervention at the
appropriate points. Also what are everyone's thoughts on a dedicated
rubygem yum repository for Fedora, something that could be optionally
added by any user independently of the core Fedora repos and have all
the greatest / latest versions of all the rubygems. Just a random idea
that I had, not sure about the feasibility / everything that would be
entailed.
The polisher source is licensed under the gpl and can be downloaded from
github:
http://github.com/movitto/polisher
I also pushed the polisher gem to the gemcutter repo and you can install
it w/
gem install polisher
provided you have a recent enough version of rubygems (w/ gemcutter
officially part of the repo list).
Feel free to send any thoughts or questions to me on/off list.
-Mo