Unfortunately this week hasn't been very productive due to lack of time. I managed to package 5-6 more gems, but I haven't submit them in Bugzilla yet. As always, the most difficult and time consuming task is to make all the test suites provided with each gem pass. And believe me this isn't always easy. So, here is what I did this week.

Meeting GitLab devs

We arranged a google hangout and we talked about the progress I make. They were kind enough to ask whether I need help with something. Then I got to meet in person Sytse Sijbrandij and Marin Jankovski during Euruko 2013. Really cool guys.

Our main concern was about the gems that are GitLab's forks and how we should deal with them since it is very unlikely they get accepted into the official Fedora repos. See next week TODOs about that matter.

Wikification and versioning process

I started a wiki page on GitLab, listing all the dependencies and their versions. I said versions because we have to deal with version mismatch, remember? I am working on a script to get them automatically on a table. So far, I can extract GitLab's and upstream versions whereas I still need Fedora's. Here's how I do it.

GitLab

gem versions are retrieved from this dictionary. Pretty simple.

Upstream

Using this method by qeuerying the API of rubygems.org and iterrating through the missing gems, I can get in a list of the latest gem versions.

Fedora

There is this nice tool in ruby called pkgwat which queries Fedora's repo database. This is also used by isitfedoraruby, which unfortunately doesn't have an API. This would make my work a lot easier.

So, I decided to give this a shot by first packaging it. This is what I am learning here, isn't it? I thought this would be a matter of time since it only depends on one unpackaged gem, sanitize (which ironically is needed by GitLab too).

(And I just whipped out a mosquito. Where the hell are they going 14.30 in the afternoon?...)

The process that I thought would take me 30 minutes top, still goes on. You see, pkgwat has a fixed dependency on nokogiri 1.5.5 whereas the latest sanitize 2.0.4 requires nokogiri>=1.6.0. On Fedora we have nokogiri 1.5.9. Let me draw that for you.

Welcome to Gem dependency hell. The only way to install it is through gem install pkwat...

Package review

My first informal review in order to be sponsored as a packager was rubygem-rugged. I did all my homework and I tested the given SPEC and SRPM with fedora-review, I built the rpm using both mock and rpmbuild and then ran rpmlint against the produced packages. I made a few notes of what I thought needed fixing and with some help from Vit¹ I submited my review.

Package submission

Last week I submited for review rubygem-timers, this week it is rubygem-redis. One package a week you say? Dude are you ever going to package all these gems? Well, submiting a package for review in bugzilla takes some time, as I carefully check to follow the guidelines as much as I can. The toughest part of it all are the testing suites. A test may rely on other gems that are not in Fedora yet, so I try to package them as well. Here you will find some packages I am working on. Most of them are not submited for review yet.

TODOs for next week

• Get more packages finished
• Complete the version table in wiki
• Start porting gemfile.py into ruby (eventually)
• Continue writing the article about Rubygem packaging
• Talk to infra team to see how that forked-gem-packaging will go
• I am just a placeholder, nothing useful here, I just wanted to continue the stairs