[katello-devel] moving to ruby 1.9.3

[Martin Povolny]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 04:33:13PM -0400, Hugh Brock wrote:
> We did this for a while with Aeolus. Unfortunately it confuses the hell
> out of ruby developers who don't know anything about RPM.
> 
> Imagine for a moment that you are a top-notch rails programmer. Unless
> you already work at Red Hat, chances are you've never had to write an
> RPM spec before.
> 
> 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.

You yourself used so many conditions, that the case is really unrealistic
;-)

If someone comes with great code and does not know the RPM stuff I am
sure someone will be happy to do the rpm-specific work for him. 

But that's just placing one more hypothesis on top of another.

> 
> 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. 
> 

I have to say that the reasons for doing RPM builds as a integral part of
the development process seem very valid to me. And also valid in the
context of Conductor.

I would point out 2: 

Unless you work on the packages all way through the project, there will
surely come some very unpleasant surprise when the time comes to release
(examples where given in the discussion and also seen in the project
history!).

If every developer is working in his own setup on his own virtual
machine using his very special environment including downloading gems
from rubygems and pulls code from github and on the other side the user
or customer uses and RPM install on a different distribution and on
variety of real hardware, then the gap between the customer and the developer
is getting HUGE.

I believe that Red Hat has the tools to make the gap as small as
possible, and has people with the expertise to use them. 

Automated package build tools and tool to install nightly build packages
to freshly installed distros providing developers access to their new
code running in the environment the customer/user will have is the way to
close the gap I think.

Why not to see the problems the packaging may bring or the user might
experience as early in the development process as possible?

-- 
Martin Povolny <mpovoly at redhat.com>
tel. +420 777714458