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On the maintainability of Ruby

On the maintainability of Ruby

Posted Jan 21, 2011 11:11 UTC (Fri) by ajb (subscriber, #9694)
Parent article: On the maintainability of Ruby

It seems like what these language-specific installers ought to do is generate an rpm or deb and install it.


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On the maintainability of Ruby

Posted Jan 21, 2011 19:29 UTC (Fri) by JohnLenz (subscriber, #42089) [Link]

This has been tried before (I don't know about ruby or not, but other languages have similar tools) and as far as I know has failed every time. I don't know the details why they don't work and don't get finished ether, it would be something to investigate.

What I think should happen instead is each of the tools should support a common API that allows dpkg and rpm to control them. For example, each language's packaging tool should have a command "tool pkgdb listxml" or something, which outputs a standardized xml (or maybe yaml) file which dpkg and rpm can parse and then display in their guis and make part of their package database. Then each tool should have a standard set of commands like "tool pkgdb install ..." that also is designed to be run by dpkg and rpm, not a user. For example, outputs easily parsable status xml or json or yaml or something. If this was standardized across all language's tools, dpkg and rpm would not need to support each individual language, there could be a config file which has the language tool commands.

Then packages from the language db could show up in dpkg and rpm (and of course, in the gui's built around them). Each language package could show up prefixed by "pyegg-" for example. You could even then have packages in the distribution package repository depend on "pyegg-some-library" and when installing the package from the distro library, dpkg and rpm would download the package from the distro plus run the correct language tool command to get everything installed.

On the maintainability of Ruby

Posted Jan 22, 2011 18:04 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

This has been suggested before, many times. I would guess that it originated as CPAN packaging discussions over a decade ago. Here's one result: http://debian.pkgs.cpan.org/

If someone were to write the same thing for Ruby, others might cheer. Personally, I'm happy enough with Bundler and rvm's gemsets that I can't imagine I'd ever use it.

On the maintainability of Ruby

Posted Jan 22, 2011 18:16 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Oops, hit the wrong reply button. My first paragraph is in reply to ajb, my second could apply to both.

You propose a common API to be used by RPM, deb, Perl/CPAN, Ruby/Gems, Python, and all the others?? Sounds like it would be pretty much impossible to agree upon, much less have everyone adopt it and debug it.

On the maintainability of Ruby

Posted Jan 28, 2011 5:31 UTC (Fri) by idupree (subscriber, #71169) [Link]

That common API is called PackageKit. At least for the distro-style packaging systems (I'm not sure if anyone has tried to integrate it with per-language systems).

Your mileage may vary.

On the maintainability of Ruby

Posted Jan 29, 2011 16:06 UTC (Sat) by ggiunta (guest, #30983) [Link]

php also has its own package manager: pear. Speaking as a php developer, I can says that similar attrition problems exist for that language too

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