On 14/08/08 at 07:05 -0000, Mathias Gug wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 05:48:34AM -0000, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > Some comments:
> > - debian/operating_system.rb is not properly licensed, and not mentioned in debian/copyright.
> 
> debian/operating_system.rb has the following statement:
> 
> #    Licensed unded the GPL. See /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL
> 
> Isn't that enough ? Adding a mention to the debian/copyright file would
> be advisable though.

Of course not. Which version of the GPL?

> > - I'm still not convinced by your update-alternatives hack. This
> should *really* go upstream, so it's fixed for every distro, not just
> Ubuntu.
> 
> Agreed. The gem system has currently shortcomings. The
> update-alternatives proposal is one way to address the issue. Upstream
> seems cooperative on that point as it provided the necessary hooks to
> implement such a system. So upstream is aware of the problem. They may
> work on solving it and it can take some time. 
> 
> On the other hand this proposal is one step toward fixing the issue, and
> it works now. Once upstream comes up with a good solution, we can
> revisit the usage of update-alternatives to manage gems binaries in
> /usr/local/bin.

Instead of using a debian-specific feature (update-alternatives), I
think that this should be implemented directly inside rubygems, so it
becomes possible for upstream to integrate this feature. Solving it in a
debian-specific clearly sends the wrong message to upstream, especially
after upstream has been helpful by adding hooks.

> > - you base your version on a git snapshot, with a >5kloc diff compared to the current version in debian unstable. Is that really reasonable, since we are far in the Ubuntu release cycle AFAIK?
> 
> IMO this is perfectly acceptable as we're not past FeatureFreeze. That
> means new upstream version can still be uploaded to the archive.

Note that it's not a new upstream version. It's a git snapshot.

> > - have you talked to Daigo Moriwaki about those deep changes to his
> Debian package? If not, when do you plan to?
> 
> Talking to Daigo Moriwaki would be helpful. However considering the
> current freeze for Lenny I doubt that this patch will be accepted in
> Debian before Ubuntu enters FeatureFreeze.

The point is not to get it into Debian *now*, but to make sure that
Daigo agrees with the solution, so Ubuntu doesn't maintain divergence on
this.

> > If I understand it correctly, you want to give Ubuntu a competitive
> > advantage by not working with upstream to address this problem globally.
> > That doesn't sound right.
> >
> 
> We're trying to improve the usage of gems so that the end user has a
> good experience using it on Ubuntu. This work involves upstream (they
> provided the necessary hooks) and also some integration work by the
> Ubuntu team so that cooperation with dpkg works well. IMO upstream won't
> be able to resolve all of the issue as there will always be some distro
> specific details (location of paths, support for multiple versions).

The path issue is completely orthogonal to the issue of binaries being
overwritten.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
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