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On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Mauricio [iso-8859-1] FernáÏdez wrote:

> There's only little documentation about how to package using rpa-base.
> There are two reasons for that:
> * I am willing to do most (all) of the packaging myself (*)
> * rpa-base is subject to possible changes that could break
>  backwards-compatibility as far as the packaging work is concerned.
>  Since we control both the installers and the corresponding packages,
>  we can modify them at once to ensure everything just works, but I would
>  hate to force those who packaged their sw. with rpa-base to update
>  their packages just because I introduced some incompatible change.
>
> In other words, I was trying to protect early adopters from additional
> work. Maybe that was excessive, so what about the following statement:

not excessive - music to my ears!

> (*) of course, I'd happily accept help for that, but whoever is offering
> it would become an RPA developer and would have to accept that he might
> occasionally have more work due to changes in rpa-base (in the past
> I've only had to update a package due to a change in rpa-base *once*,
> but I like to think that I'm free to make rpa-base better w/o causing any
> 'external pain' :)

this is a good plan.  i would like to volunteer but am having difficultly with
handling my existing commitments - i think the quality control aspect will
eventually by key in convincing sysad types to adopt ruby.  just out of
curiosity what kind of development/maintainance to see in the next year?

> That said, you can find some information at
> http://rubyarchive.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?Developer_Documentation/Introduction_To_Packaging_Using_Rpa_Base

i did scan over that a bit...


> For your reference, here's the rpafied install.rb for session:

so - if i wanted to assist you in maintaining this package - i would update
this file and send to it along with a tar.gz?

> require 'rpa/install'
>
> class Install_session < RPA::Install::FullInstaller
>    name "session"
>    version "2.1.8-1"
>    classification Library
>    build do
>        installdocs %w[HISTORY README TODO VERSION]
>        installexamples "samples"
>    end
>    install do
>        skip_default RunUnitTests
>    end

very cool that the samples are installed.

>    description <<EOF
> Library to drive external progams via pipes from Ruby.
>
> Session::* offers a set of class for driving external progams via pipes. t
> offers a significant abstraction over Open3::popen since stdout/stderr can
> be processed individually for each command.  Additionally the exit_statusf
> each command is made available.
>
> Sessions are Thread safe (in the sense that they do not block on io
> operations) allowing command spawn from guis to update widgets with output
> while running in the background.
> EOF
> end

no fair with the caps key - i work hard to obfusicate my ramblings!  ;-)

> As you can see, it's mostly declarative and fairly easy to understand.
> It's longer than the corresponding gemspec due to the description:

yes.  but both are painless enough that i'll happily tweak the templates you
and assaph have given me.   in fact i'll probably add a little code generator
for my libs that spits out both gem and rpa templates to go along with my
inc/module/class genorators.

thanks for making this effort.

-a
--
===============================================================================
| EMAIL   :: Ara [dot] T [dot] Howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| PHONE   :: 303.497.6469
| A flower falls, even though we love it;
| and a weed grows, even though we do not love it. 
|   --Dogen
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