Re: [gitorious] Fedora packaging (was: Gitorious Versioning)

[Ken Dreyer]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 3:15 AM, Marius Mårnes Mathiesen
<marius.m...@gmail.com> wrote:
> While we're at the packaging topic: I saw some posts on a Fedora mailing
> list that you're working on packaging Gitorious for Fedora, that would be
> really great! Any news? Need help?

Nice, thanks for asking. I've broken out all the steps that must be
done [1]. There's a brief summary under "High Level Steps and Issues".

I spent a couple of weeks packaging up all the requisite gems, but I
was working against EPEL 6, and my specs are not up to the latest Ruby
standards for Fedora packaging. I anticipate this is still going to be
about 50% of the work.

I think the other 50% is going to be Gitorious itself. Here's the
big-ish items that are relevant to you as the upstream project:

#1: I'm pretty sure the old Rails version under vendor/ is going to be
a blocker to getting Gitorious itself into Fedora [2]. Fedora 17 has
Rails 3.0, and Fedora 18 is going to have Rails 3.2. I see a couple of
branches in mainline ("rails-3.0" and "rails-3.1"), and there's the
bug report in redmine [3] but I'm not sure where else to look. I'm a
RoR newbie so I don't have a good feel for how much work this would
involve... my guess is that it's a lot :)

#2: Another big "unknown" for me is Ruby 1.9.3 compatibility. I'm
hoping that the test suite is going to assist me here. I would really
like to get "rake test" to pass during the builds on all versions of
Fedora and EPEL 6. (It looks like there's one or two gems that are
Ruby 1.8-only, also, so I need to get familiar with those.)

#3: Fedora has dropped ruby-net-ldap in favor of net-ldap. I don't yet
know how much work it would be to patch Gitorious to use the net-ldap
Gem.

If there's anything else I should know about in terms of dependencies
(present or future plans) I'm very interested.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ktdreyer/Gitorious
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries
[3] https://issues.gitorious.org/issues/3

[Carlos Mundi]

Nice summary.  Having done a few,substantial webapps on other platforms but not RoR, I'm not sure how relevant my perspective is.  All the same, I know that in *app deployment* I see value in bundling to isolate my apps for stability.  Lockdown is the line of last defense against hyperactive upstream changes.

But I also think that Fedora have eloquently articulated the causes which impel them to resist bundling in packaged apps.  Thanks for sharing that well reasoned link.  Packages inevitably require maintenance, and it only gets more expensive the longer it goes.

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[Bas Vodde]

Hi,

> #3: Fedora has dropped ruby-net-ldap in favor of net-ldap. I don't yet
> know how much work it would be to patch Gitorious to use the net-ldap
> Gem.

Its the same. In fact, I think I did a merge request a couple of months ago with this change. It got delayed and I need to re-do the change based on the latest but didn't upgrade to the latest.

But net-ldap is just a new version of net-ruby-ldap and the change (for me) took no effort.

Bas

>
> If there's anything else I should know about in terms of dependencies
> (present or future plans) I'm very interested.
>
> [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ktdreyer/Gitorious
> [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries
> [3] https://issues.gitorious.org/issues/3
>

[dpwrussell]

 Presumably the work done to enable the Fedora packaging to be done will also make it much easier for other distributions to package gitorious, e.g. Ubuntu? While I didn't find the installation instructions too difficult, as someone who has never uses ruby on rails before, it was basically copying and pasting commands and hoping they work. I really hate letting anything other than the package manager loose on my system when it comes to installing stuff.