[katello-devel] Fwd: Ruby hack-day - extracting bundled gems from ruby distro

[Ivan Necas]

Hi there,

Everyone interested welcome. Also spread the word if you like the idea.

-- Ivan

----- Forwarded Message -----
> Dear Rubyists,
> 
> As a maintainer of Ruby in Fedora and RHEL, I occasionally hear
> complaints, how we did something and that we diverge from upstream in
> some cases. And I agree with you, there is room for improvements.
> 
> However, this time, we would like to do something different. We (me,
> inecas and bkabrda) would like to invite everybody of you to join our
> hack-day, which we would like to held at *the 26th of June 2013 at Red
> Hat's Brno offices* (any online presence is welcome as well ;). The
> whole purpose of this hack day would be to solve one outstanding
> upstream issue: #5481: Gemifying Ruby standard library [1]. Solving this
> issue would provide several benefits to Ruby community and to ourselves:
> 
> * The "default" gems would use standard directory structure, as typical
> GEM_HOME (currently, in Ruby 2.0, it is unfortunately just bunch of hack
> and workarounds IMO)
> * We could easily be able to replace default gems by their newer
> versions, without side effect, which are more or less described in [2].
> * Easier security updates, such as recent issues with Json or RDoc,
> where the vulnerable code can be easily removed from system and replaced
> by its secure version.
> * All gems would be listed in your Gemfile.lock. Currently, you never
> see gems such as io-console or bigdecimel in your Gemfile.lock, although
> they are in fact dependency of every Ruby application.
> * It would allow to easily discover upstream of gem. Currently, it is
> not obvious, if all changes (for example in Rake) are available also in
> rubygems.org version of Rake, where to report issues, etc.
> * Gemified StdLib could help also in development of alternative Ruby
> implementations (I hope).
> 
> If you are interesting how the solution should look like, some while
> ago, I tried some initial implementation on Rake gem [3].
> 
> What is the benefit of this hack-day? Although I cannot promise, that
> the hack-day output will be merged into mainline Ruby:
> 
> * You will learn something about Ruby internals and configuration
> * You will understand better what was the rationale behind decisions we
> made for Ruby packaging
> * and the most importantly, you will demonstrate, that there are
> actually developers and community, who use packaged Ruby and use Ruby on
> other platform then Mac OS X.
> 
> 
> Thanks for joining us and feel free to provide any feedback (preferably
> on ruby-rails-list).
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> Vít, Ivan and Slávek
> 
> 
> [1] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/5481
> [2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6124
> [3] https://github.com/voxik/ruby/commits/move-gems/
>