[opensuse-ruby] Revised gem packaging

30 Jul 2012

      Hi,

Want to know what I did for #hackweek8? I pulled ruby packaging apart
and put it back together.

I...
- split ruby-common from the ruby package, so it can also be used
  from ruby 1.8 distros
- added patched rpms to devel:languages:ruby:backports for older distros
  to support overwriting macros and ruby dependencies (11.4 and sle11)
- enhanced the %gem_install macro
- wrote a gemspec to rpm converter to have requires and provides in rpm
  automatic without gem2rpm run
- changed the gem2rpm template heavily

The key idea behind my work was that creating gem.rpm with gem2rpm is
easy, updating is problematic (and over half the gems in dlre being
outdated kind of proves my point :)

So the new template has no requires and no provides, because rpm can
find out both from the installed .gemspec. E.g. I found a couple of
cases that left broken provides with an update (e.g. 0.8.X providing
_0_7). But this strange suffixing is no longer necessary anyway.

E.g. rails-3_2 has these automatic requires now:

ruby(abi) = 1.9.1
rubygem(1.9.1:actionmailer) = 3.2.7
rubygem(1.9.1:actionpack) = 3.2.7
rubygem(1.9.1:activerecord) = 3.2.7
rubygem(1.9.1:activeresource) = 3.2.7
rubygem(1.9.1:activesupport) = 3.2.7
rubygem(1.9.1:bundler) >= 1.0
rubygem(1.9.1:bundler) < 2
rubygem(1.9.1:railties) = 3.2.7

No more bundler-1_0, but a simple bundler < 2.

The automatic provides cover the old names, but I kind of hope we can
drop them in the future:

rubygem(1.9.1:rails) = 3.2.7
rubygem(rails) = 3.2.7
rubygem-rails = 3.2.7
rubygem-rails-3 = 3.2.7
rubygem-rails-3_2 = 3.2.7
rubygem-rails-3_2_7 = 3.2.7

I do not generate buildrequires in the template either, even though this
is a rather tough call.

We need buildrequires mainly to check that the dependencies are in the
repo, but they create several problems:
 - gems build in "rings" and require a finished -> succeeded step for
   every ring, a rails update are 4 such rings. YOU GET CRAZY if the obs
   is busy!
 - you can't rely on automatism as the gem specificies "rails > 1.0",
   but there are 4 such rails versions and the build service wants to
   know which one you mean. And in case the rails version requires a
   rack > 1.1, it wants to know which one of those. YOU GET CRAZY!

As gem packaging has to be 99% automatic to compete with out of rpm gem,
I went for calling gem install with -f and ignore buildignores.

To have a way to check dependencies in OBS, I created a small package
called "all-good", that itself buildrequires all gems in the repository.
That means for a rails update you will only need one ring: update all
gems and then let the scheduler calculate if all-good can be expanded or
if something misses dependencies. (all-good has a script to update
the buildrequires if you had new gems)

As some gems require specific but old versions of other gems, I created
(DISCLAIMER: careful, do not read further if you're easy to upset) a
package containing all those gems. This package will build rpms for all
gems in the source directory. While fixing the current dependencies, I
found 33 gems that I didn't feel worthy enough for their own spec file,
so they ended up in d:l:r:e/all-the-others.

It should be noted, that all the gems in there are of course tabu for
factory submission. If you need a dependency in factory, create a spec
file and dig out the license, gems are pretty bad in specifying the
license in .gemspec, so most gem2rpm generated spec files have the
CHECK(Ruby) license (even though most I found in practice have MIT).

As digging out the license is pretty boring work you don't want to do
another time when updating the package, I changed gem2rpm to take the
license from the output file in case there is no license in the gemspec.

This makes it possible to update to a newer version for gems pretty
easy: gem2rpm *.gem -o *.spec.

Whenever a spec file needs manual adaption, I add a MANUAL comment in
there, so you spot in a diff very easy that you need to check e.g.
an extra buildrequire or some file list manipulation.

If the week had more days, I think I would put the whole %package
and %files sections in a macro, so that we can (later) have ruby20 and
ruby19 in parallel. If the requires are automatic and the buildrequires
nonexistant, it's basically about the %files sections.

Greetings, Stephan

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James Tan

James Tan

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