Comment 47 for bug 145267

Hi,

Some comments:
- debian/operating_system.rb is not properly licensed, and not mentioned in debian/copyright.
- 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.
- why the switch to simple-patchsys?
- 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?
- have you talked to Daigo Moriwaki about those deep changes to his Debian package? If not, when do you plan to?
- You never answered by question about a bug# in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libgems-ruby/+bug/145267/comments/42 .
- What's the Ubuntu policy about hosting VCS branches for packages? Shouldn't you use bzr on launchpad instead?

Most importantly, your motivations sound unclear to me:
> > No, it's a patch that makes rubygems work better on systems with
> > update-alternatives, while you should aim at a global solution instead.
>
> No I aim for the simplest solution that will solve the most pain in
> the shortest possible time. Others can then generalise that if they
> want. My time is paid for don't forget.
>
> From an Ubuntu point of view a superior package is good, because it
> gives people a reason why they should use Ubuntu and switch to the
> package rather than continue to mess around with the source package as
> they do now.
>
> Certainly I'm not going to get my 200 odd customers to move away from
> source installation without a nice fat carrot to offer them.

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.

In conclusion, with my Debian ruby maintainer and pkg-ruby-extras member hats, I still don't think this is the way to go. But you are free to ignore my comments of course, as you did in the past.