[katello-devel] moving to ruby 1.9.3

[Jan Pazdziora]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 04:33:13PM -0400, Hugh Brock wrote:
> 
> Now let's say by some miracle you become interested in contributing to
> upstream Katello, or Aeolus. You poke around, talk to people, figure out
> that the feature you want isn't already in progress and that upstream
> would like to have it. So you go off and write the thing. Along the way
> you add your friend's handy gem that does XYZ.
> 
> When you submit your patch upstream, we say, oh, gee, sorry, we don't
> take patches that add gem dependencies unless you also wrap them up in
> this arcane packaging format that is redundant (for rubyists) and not
> the least bit useful to you.
> 
> I don't think I need to describe what the typical reaction would be...
> 
> If we ever want any of these projects to fly on their own without 100%
> support from Red Hat, we have to stop doing things that make them weird
> to non-RH folks. Like even talking about RPM... or, god help us,
> Fedora. 

The danger of the approach you describe is that you pull in a
dependency into your project which will be hard or impossible to
meet in the downstream product, due to licensing or other issues.

At the point some unlucky souls will finally get to do the packaging
and find out the issues with distributability of said dependency or
with incompatibility of other dependencies that are already in the
OS, it might already be cemented deep in the project and it will be
much harder to workaround or replace. The developer who reviewed
and merged the pull request will already be working on something else
and not really care about resolving the issue.

-- 
Jan Pazdziora
Principal Software Engineer, Satellite Engineering, Red Hat