It is definitely not a coincidence that whenever I have to dive into Gentoo Ruby packaging I end up writing a long series of articles for my blog that should have the tag “Rant” attached, until I end up deciding that it’s not worth it and I should rather do something else.
The problem is that, as I said many times before (and I guess the Debian Ruby team agrees as well), the whole design of RubyGems makes it very difficult to package them properly, and at the same time provides the developers with enough concepts to make the packaging even more tricky than it would by merely due tot he format.
As the title says, for one reason or another, RubyGems’s main accomplishment is simply to put extensions’ developers and distributions’ packages one against the other, with the former group insisting on doing things “fun”, and the latter doing things “right’. I guess most of the members of the former group also never tried managing a long term deployment of their application outside of things like Heroku (that are paid to take care of that).
And before somebody tells me I’m being mean by painting the developers puny with their concept of fun, it’s not my fault if in the space of an hour after tweeting a shorter version of the first paragraph of this post, two people told me that “development is fun”… I’m afraid for most people that’s what matters, it being fun, not reliable or solid…
At any rate… even though as we speak nobody expressed interest (via flattr) on packaging of the Ruby MongoDB driver that I posted about yesterday, I started looking into it (mostly because I’m doing another computer recovery for a customer and thus I had some free time in my hands while I waited for antivirus to complete, dd_rescue to copy data over, and so on so forth).
I was able to get some basic gems for bson and mongo working, which were part of the hydra repository I noted, but the problems started when I looked into plucky which is the “thin layer” used by the actual ORM. It is not surprising that this gem also is “neutered” to the point of being useless for Gentoo packaging requirements, but there are more issues. First of all it required one more totally new gem to be packaged – log_buddy which also required some fixes – that is not listed in the RubyGems website (which is proper, if you consider that the tests are not executable from the gem file), but most importantly, it relied on the matchy gem.
This is something I already had to deal with, as it was in another long list of dependencies last year or the one before (I honestly forgot). This gem is interesting: while the package is dev-ruby/matchy, it was only available as a person-specific gem in Gemcutter: jnunemaker-matchy and mcmire-matchy; the former is the original (0.4.0), while the latter is a fork that fixed a few issues, among which there was the main problem: jnunemaker-matchy is available neither as a tarball nor as a git tag.
For the package that originally required matchy for us (dev-ruby/crack), mcmire’s fork worked quite well, and indeed it was just a matter of telling it to use the other gem for it to work. That’s not the case for plucky, even thought jnunemaker didn’t release any version of matchy in two years, it only works with his version of matchy. Which meant packaging that one as well, for now.
Did I tell you that mcmire’s version works with Ruby 1.9, while jnunemaker’s doesn’t? No? Well, I’m telling you now. Just so you know, almost in 2012, this is a big deal.
And no, there is not a 0.4.0 yet. Two years after release. The code stagnated since then.
Oh and plucky’s tests will fail depending on how Ruby decides to sort an Hash’s keys array. Array comparison in Ruby is (obviously) ordered.
Then you look at the actual mongo_mapper gem that was the leaf of the whole tree.. and you find out that running the tests without bundler fixing the dependencies is actually impossible (due to the three versions of i18n that we have to allow side-installation of). And the Gemfile, while never declaring dependencies on the official Mongo driver (it gets it through plucky), looks for bson_ext (the compiled C extension, that in Gentoo was not going to exist, since it’s actually installed by the same bson package — I’ll have to create a fake gemspec for it just so it can be satisfied).
And this actually brings us to a different problem as well: even though plucky has been updated (to version 0.4.3) in November, it still requires series 1.3 of the Mongo driver. Version 1.4.0 was released in September, and we’re at version 1.5.2.
And I didn’t name SystemTimer gem, which is declared a requirement during development (but not by the gem of course, since you’re not supposed to run tests there) only for Ruby 1.8 (actually only for mri18, what about Ruby EE?) which lacks an indication of a homepage in the RubyGems website….
I love Ruby. I hate its development.