Re: helper Makefile fragment to handle Ruby gems

["Johnny C. Lam" <jlam%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 10:49:52PM +0100, Stoned Elipot wrote:
> Also about the build-at-install-time-thus-possibly-as-root issue.
> OpenSuSe seems to have proposed a gem install command extra option
> to effectively render the installation a "DESTDIR type" one.
> Google for rubygem opensuse buildroot.
> 
> Using this approach and enforcing rubygem gem packages to be build
> with DESTDIR might be an easy way out of this problem...

I've committed changes to the rubygems package to include the OpenSuSE
patches.  I think your suggestion to force using DESTDIR-style
installation with rubygems is a good idea, but I'd like to get your
work into the tree before we play around with this.

There is an issue with gems that I'm not sure how to handle with
pkgsrc.  Gems allows multiple versions to be installed and that is a
key feature of using gems in practice.  However, pkgsrc will not allow
multiple versions of a package to be installed.  Do you have any ideas
to deal with this?

For the naming convention for gems, I'm wondering what's the best way
to name them.  One possibility is to use the Ruby package names with
"gem" in name, e.g ${RUBY_PKGPREFIX}-gem-activesupport.  Alternatively,
we could simply provide every Ruby package that's available as a gem
and use the gem instead of the other installation methods -- in that
case, we'd just keep the normal names, e.g.
${RUBY_PKGPREFIX}-activesupport.  It would be good to get input from
<taca> and <minskim> on the best approach.

        Cheers,

        -- Johnny C. Lam