[katello-devel] moving to ruby 1.9.3

[Mo Morsi]

On 10/18/2012 11:39 AM, Cliff Perry wrote:
>>> I think we need to standardize on whether replies go above or below the
>>> original comment :)
>>>
>
> In the middle - don't standardize - cos people will then complain. We
> are all grown adults and can adapt to everyone's habits.

+1, many a flame war has been started over this topic alone :-)

>
>>>
>>> I don't think anybody participating in this thread suggests that
>>> packaging is not important. Nor is anyone talking about about
>>> abandoning
>>> nightly builds, etc.
>>>
>>> I'm suggesting that we remove development process dependency on build
>>> artifacts. Let's use rubygems.org in development (I know of several
>>> people who are doing this already; it's *very* useful to be able to add
>>> new dependencies in development quickly). Let's use system-provided
>>> gems
>>> in packaged Katello.
>>>
>> +1
>
> Personal opinion.
>
> I'll suggest, if you make a pull request for katello in github, that
> you have resolved gem packaging/build before submitting a patch/code
> that requires a new gem. In other words - hack away as you want, but
> once you want it formally in Katello - clean it up and make it easily
> consumable for all, wanting to install Katello from nightly rpm based
> yum repos. If a pull request requires a new(er) gem, then it should be
> rejected until that gem is packaged and available via rpm in one of
> the usual repos for katello.
>
> Cliff

I'm in favour of this approach and for the longest time we tried doing
this w/ Aeolus. Unfortunately what happend is that when
push-came-to-shove (when time is tight), these requirements get dropped
in lieu of getting features in. We always ended up w/ the inevitable
packaging nightmare during release time.

Granted things have been getting better as we've spread packaging around
and given that many core dependenices are now in Fedora but there is
still work togo. Having the products in Fedora and RHEL is a great
selling point IMO, especially to established communities based on those
platforms, though I understand these restrictions are hard to enforce /
expect of developers, especially with other competing requirements.

As with everything there are many aspects to this, technical,
organizational, and promotional. I'm still not convinced that we can't
do more technically, I'm working on a feature for the
http://isitfedoraruby.com site that will allow you to do a mass import
of a gem. With a simple click or two, I want to be able to pull an gem
and all dependencies, generate spec files for all of those using
gem2rpm, and if possible create rpms and a yum repo for immediate
consumption. This still doesn't solve the problem of getting everything
into Fedora, but getting to that point might present solutions not
feasible before.

As always any efforts on the Fedora / Ruby platform, whether for our
products or just in general to improve things is more than appreciated.
You can find more about the sig here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ruby_SIG

  -Mo