RubyGems and Debian
I was surprised to see some activity for packaging RubyGems for Debian two weeks ago; it has been really quiet in that area for a while now. There had been a lot of discussion in the Ruby community some time ago whether RPA or RubyGems should be used to install third party Ruby libraries and applications. Currently the general consensus is that both systems can live together as long as developers are not going to publish their software in Gem form only.
Last week there was some discussion about RPA/RubyGems and Debian on the Debian-Ruby list as a reaction on the packaging of Rails (which is well underway). Marcelo E. Magallon brought up some interesting points and hit the spot with what I had been thinking about the situation too.
In my opinion RPA does and will do a better job for Debian Ruby package maintainers both philosophy and operational wise, because they are very much alike. I’ve posted about RPA earlier and have decided to ITP RPA base. The resulting package will be meant as a tool for Debian Ruby developers so that QA can be done in cooperation with the RPA team but also to work in a CPAN-like manner, provided it can be adapted not to update Debian native installed libs and handle other subtle issues.