I have ranted and ranted and ranted about Ruby packages not being good enough for packaging, I also have ranted about upstream developers not even getting their own testsuite cleared up, or being difficult to work with. I have complained about GitHub because of the way it allows to “fork” packages too easily. I’m not going to retract those notes, but… sometimes things do turn out pretty well.
In the past days I’ve been working toward adding Rudy in tree — as I don’t want to keep on building my own slow, hard, and boring scripts to deal with EC2, and I’m spending more time understanding how to get EC2 working than writing the code I’m paid to write. As I wrote before, this is another of those compound projects that is split in a high number of small projects (some literally one source files per gem!). It worried me to begin with, but on the other hand, the result is altogether not bad.
Not only the first fixes I had to apply to amazon-ec2 were applied, and a new version released, the very night I sent them upstream (and added them to Gentoo, now gone already), but also Delano (author of Rudy – and thus of lots of its dependencies) applied quickly most of my changes to get rid of the mandatory requirement for hanna, even on some packages I didn’t send them for yet, and released them again. Of course the job is far from finished, as I haven’t reached Rudy itself yet, but the outcome start to look much nicer.
I also have good words for GitHub right now: since it makes it very easy and quick to take the code from another project, patch it up and send it to the original author to be merged (and re-released hopefully). This also works fine with patches coming from other contributors, like Thomas Enebo from JRuby who sent me a fix (or “workaround” if you prefer, but it’s still a way to achieve the wanted result in a compatible way) to make newer matchy work properly with JRuby. On the whole, I have to say I’m getting quite positive about GitHub, but I’d very much like they allowed me to reply to the messages I receive by mail, rather than having to log-in on the system. I positively hate multiple mail systems, Facebook’s as well as GitHub’s, as well as most forums’.
And for the shameless plug and trivia time, I have more repositories in my GitHub page than items in my wishlist…
Anyway, back to work now!
