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

[Ike Devolder]

Op zaterdag 19 mei 2012 19:26:43 schreef 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 But they are constantly out of date, because it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 somebody wrote pacgem, wich is a ok idea, but its a little bit outdated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 problem with the outdated PKGBUILDs.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].

i would say make this sourcecode public so you can take in suggestions from 
others.

> 
> 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!'

true, it might not be considered KISS, BUT it provides a KISS solution for the 
enduser which is in my opinion the most important.
So you could create a archgems user in aur and try to get all the rubygem 
packages under the maintenance of this user.

> 
> 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
--Ike