[aur-general] Merging ruby-jekyll into a single package

[Anatol Pomozov]

Hi

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 1:29 PM, Hugo Osvaldo Barrera <hugo at barrera.io> wrote:
> Hi there!
>
> Jekyll is currently a bit of a mess on the AUR. There's packages for several
> "plugins", like ruby-jekyll-pagination, and several others.
>
> However, these are not plugins in the traditional sense of the word: jekyll
> won't run if they're not installed, so they're more like libraries. Libraries
> that are only used inside jekyll and are not designed to be used independently.
>
> So there's very strong codependency. ruby-jekyll-pagination and ruby-jekyll
> end up depending on each other mutually. Again, "-pagination" is merely an
> example, there's plenty of these.
>
> Someone suggested merging these into a single package: they're diferente
> upstream gems, but only work in unison, and are useless separately, so I'm
> inclined to simplify this on our side (KISS, right?).
>
> Would this course of action be deemed appropriate? Is it acceptable? I know we
> usually don't bundle stuff like this in AUR, but this seems like a strong
> exception, since we're talking about packages with mutual codependency.
>
> Thoughts? Opinions?

The simplest and the most logical way to handle it is to follow
upstream packaging. It means keep gems in its separate arch packages
and avoid bundling.

There is a tool called gem2arch (https://github.com/anatol/gem2arch)
that automatically updates PKGBUILD files, generates new packages if
needed. Managing gem dependencies is hard and gem2arch was implemented
to make the package management automatic.