Phil Tomson (ptkwt / shell1.aracnet.com) wrote:
> 
> Quite true, I find that I can't use raa-install with many sourceforge 
> hosted packages as there is no direct link to the package.
> 

And raa-install does have some code to accomodate links such as:

  http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/yaml4r/yamlrb-0.47.tar.gz

Raa-install will select a sourceforge mirror and rewrite the URL.  But
then there are sourceforge links in RAA such as this:

  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=44533

Which become very difficult to rewrite.

> >If an author checks in a RAR file, then
> >Raa-install must look at supporting RAR?
> 
> what's RAR?
> 

Compression format.

> 
> I would tend to agree...  In addition to what you've said, I think we 
> should also have some sort of tool that makes it easy for package creators 
> to create these package files - something like the tool that Andy Hunt 
> showed at RubyConf.
> 

Perhaps an raa-update is in order.  A command line tool that could
verify that your package cooperates with raa-install.  Then, providing
it with your password, raa-update will make your update to RAA.

And, as you mention, raa-update could help owners to create the
install.rb and setup.rb.

> 
> A few more ideas:  Now that Nahi has enforced a canonical naming scheme on 
> the RAA (Why, that's why I was asking you about this earlier) it would 
> seem to be fairly easy to create something that redefines the 
> Kernel#require method so that it catches the 'LoadError' exception (I 
> think that's what the exception is called when it can't find the file to 
> be required) and tries to use raa-install to download and install the 
> package.
> 

In order for this to work, the canonical name in RAA must match the
require line.  Or such a require could take a second argument indicating
the package's name in RAA...

  require 'rexml/document', 'rexml'

Many great ideas, Phil.  I really like the idea of having an
install-maker script.  That could really help pass the baton on to
raa-install.

_why