On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 06:00:46PM +0900, Mauricio FernáÏdez wrote: > I'd have liked a chapter on good practices, which would benefit all > repackagers -- making not only RPA's, but also FreeBSD's, Debian's, > etc job easier. I actually consider this *much* more important than a > detailed explanation of how to use RubyGems or rpa-base: good practices > are more stable than packaging technology, esp. in the initial stages. Indeed. Next to coding style, this an import part of a software project/program. Until now I haven't looked into gems very much, I was satisfied with what was available in Debian, but I'm bound to need some more libraries :) so also will package some stuff, since I don't intend to use gems in such a way that I bypass the build system. So, it is nice to have a packaging standard which not enforces but stimulates those best practices. For example requiring/stimulating/forcing the coder to do 'require "../../../../../../some/libdir/lib.rb"' because of a given dir structure, will make it very hard to (re)package the result. > Looking at the TOC of Pickaxe 2ed, it seems that chapter is very much > focused on RubyGems; I'd have preferred a general overview, followed by > an explanation of Aoki's setup.rb and then some short notes about how to > use RubyGems and most importantly where to find up-to-date documentation. > IMHO it makes little sense to give too many details since the specifics > are still subject to frequent changes. For instance, if that chapter > mentioned something about require_gem vs. stubs, it'd be already > partially out of date by now :-| I agree completely, but since it's at the printers, there's nothing to do about it. Maybe this general overview can be written anyway and put on www.ruby-doc.org, since it is becoming more and more a central point for this sort of things. Paul -- Student @ Eindhoven | JID: paul / luon.net University of Technology, The Netherlands | email: paul / luon.net >>> Using the Power of Debian GNU/Linux <<< | GnuPG: finger paul / luon.net