Ruby hack-day - extracting bundled gems from ruby distro

Hi there,

Everyone interested welcome. Also spread the word if you like the idea.

– Ivan

··· ----- Forwarded Message ----- > Dear Rubyists, > > As a maintainer of Ruby in Fedora and RHEL, I occasionally hear > complaints, how we did something and that we diverge from upstream in > some cases. And I agree with you, there is room for improvements. > > However, this time, we would like to do something different. We (me, > inecas and bkabrda) would like to invite everybody of you to join our > hack-day, which we would like to held at *the 26th of June 2013 at Red > Hat's Brno offices* (any online presence is welcome as well ;). The > whole purpose of this hack day would be to solve one outstanding > upstream issue: #5481: Gemifying Ruby standard library [1]. Solving this > issue would provide several benefits to Ruby community and to ourselves: > > * The "default" gems would use standard directory structure, as typical > GEM_HOME (currently, in Ruby 2.0, it is unfortunately just bunch of hack > and workarounds IMO) > * We could easily be able to replace default gems by their newer > versions, without side effect, which are more or less described in [2]. > * Easier security updates, such as recent issues with Json or RDoc, > where the vulnerable code can be easily removed from system and replaced > by its secure version. > * All gems would be listed in your Gemfile.lock. Currently, you never > see gems such as io-console or bigdecimel in your Gemfile.lock, although > they are in fact dependency of every Ruby application. > * It would allow to easily discover upstream of gem. Currently, it is > not obvious, if all changes (for example in Rake) are available also in > rubygems.org version of Rake, where to report issues, etc. > * Gemified StdLib could help also in development of alternative Ruby > implementations (I hope). > > If you are interesting how the solution should look like, some while > ago, I tried some initial implementation on Rake gem [3]. > > What is the benefit of this hack-day? Although I cannot promise, that > the hack-day output will be merged into mainline Ruby: > > * You will learn something about Ruby internals and configuration > * You will understand better what was the rationale behind decisions we > made for Ruby packaging > * and the most importantly, you will demonstrate, that there are > actually developers and community, who use packaged Ruby and use Ruby on > other platform then Mac OS X. > > > Thanks for joining us and feel free to provide any feedback (preferably > on ruby-rails-list). > > Thanks. > > > Vít, Ivan and Slávek > > > [1] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/5481 > [2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6124 > [3] https://github.com/voxik/ruby/commits/move-gems/ >