[arch-general] rubygems, the arch way and the aur

[martin kalcher]

Hey archers,

i am not sure if this topic belongs to aur-devel or arch-general so i 
will post it here, because i think the aur-devel readers will read this 
list too.

I think rubygems is very nice. It makes it pretty easy to manage your 
gems and it doesnt conflict with the "Arch way" as long as you install 
your gems in your $HOME. But many users want system wide available gems. 
Hmm, no problem with the --no-user-install switch, pretty KISS.

But it violates the "Arch way" at the point, that we want to use pacman 
to install software, because we know and trust pacman and we dont want 
to use random software to install/remove files at critical locations of 
our systems.

There are some solutions. Many people uploaded ruby-* PKGBUILDs to the 
AUR. Great Idea. But they are constantly out of date, because it 
requires some work to keep on track with rubygems.org (I am not sure if 
this is a correct english sentence, but i think you will get it.). So 
somebody wrote pacgem, wich is a ok idea, but its a little bit outdated 
too. I think the AUR solution is better, but we have to solve the 
problem with the outdated PKGBUILDs.

My suggestions

I wrote a simple python script that creates PKGBUILDs from the 
rubygems.org API. I wrote it just to figure out if this works, so its 
pretty straight forward and i dont want to publish it it yet. It worked 
quite nice - it can resolve dependencies and stuff like that - but there 
is one problem at the moment. The API does not provide any checksums for 
the gems, but i opened an feature request [0].

With this script i could imagine two things.

Setting up a virtual AUR user, who handles all ruby-* packages. Then we 
create a rubygems account for this user, so we can create a custom 
rubygems feed for this user, with the gems we have in the AUR. Once a 
day a script checks the feed for updated gems and creates new PKGBUILDs, 
if needed. Pretty awesome! If it is possible to integrate this into the 
AUR, this would be my favorite solution. But i could imagine, that some 
of you will yell: 'This not what we consider KISS!'

The second solution is to provide my own litte archgems website, that 
does exactly the same. But having this stuff at a single place (AUR) 
would be really cool.

Let me know, what you are thinking.

Cheers, ushi

[0] https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.org/issues/427