[katello-devel] Experience contributing a new feature as a user

[Ivan Nečas]

On 08/15/2012 06:13 AM, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 11:27:52AM -0400, Og Maciel wrote:
>> My point for this email is not to blame anyone but to ask the following question: how can we make it easier for people to contribute to katello without having to jump through endless hoops???
> You either need all developer dependencies to be delivered as
> precompiled RPMs, or you need to undergo this compilation process
> every time you install those gems. This is how rubygems work - they are
> basically source packages which is fine for pure-ruby packages, but for
> gems with extensions its more tough.
>
The problem with apipie not being installed right with bundle install is 
our gem repo preparation script is failing for some time (hopefully will 
be fixed soon, nothing else is holding us back to have it there).

If you're lucky enough, you use some yum-backed distro and you can enjoy 
all the advantages it has: yum install rubygem-redcarpet (available in 
Fedora and EPEL), yum install rubygem-apipie-rails (in our nightly repo 
[1] since tonight). bundle install: problem solved :)

One improvement I could see is to distribute all the development 
packages (including test frameworks etc) as RPMs and provide 
katello-devel package, that would install all the dependencies so that 
the developer is ready to go with one command. That would also allow us 
to get rid of our rubygem repo and make the "source :rubygems" optional.

All we can do for other rubygem users is to document it somewhere. Oh 
wait, we did [2] :). Ruby developers are quite used to have the 
ruby-devel (and other development packages) installed on the machine.

[1] - 
http://koji-katello.lab.eng.brq.redhat.com/releases/yum/nightly/RHEL/6Server/x86_64/
[2] - 
https://fedorahosted.org/katello/wiki/AdvancedInstallation#SetUpDevelopmentusingGit

-- 
Ivan