Hi all,

First, to be fair, I tell my standpoint: I am a Debian developer.
However, I try to talk something independent of distributions.

Difficulties of converting gems to official native packages are not only
technical issues but also checking license and copyright of each file
and writing man manuals, documentations and descriptions. Talking with
original authors is often required. Making *official* native packages,
which I think you really want, is more difficult than converting gems to
native package.

I think it is not realistic to convert all/almost gems, for example, in
rubyforge to official native packages, especially automatically.

As Austin said at his #7, It would be very nice if gems provide API to
get copyrights and licenses of each file.


> 4. Compatibility with linux distro packing systems, reducing the
> amount of work necessary to repackage gems.

> What if a gem could be treated like a tarball?  Like you run `gem
> extract RMagick-0.2.6.gem' and you're left with a directory containing
> the distribution and a `gem-setup.rb' which could do the work of
> handling gem-related installation tasks while leaving the library
> distribution open to patching and custom installation?


Nice idea. Yes, what I want is not complete converting tools but helper
tools to expand files in gems to arbitrary directories.  For example
configure for make.

% ./configure --bin=./tmp/usr/bin --lib=./tmp/usr/lib/ruby/1.8
% gem install some_gem.gem


Packaging applications and defining policy for them (in an OS
independent way) is more difficult than libraries for repackagers and
_original authors_. I hope RubyGems' rule is simple enough for library
authors.


Thanks,
Daigo

-- 
Daigo Moriwaki
beatles_at_sgtpepper_dot_net