Subject: Re: [bug#34650] Acknowledgement ([PATCH] ruby-mailcatcher: Draft)

From: Christopher Baines <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2019 19:10:12 +0000

Hey,

Thanks for these patches Pierre, I haven't looked at them in detail, but
one I did spot was ruby-tilt. I've already sent a patch for that here
[1]. In fact, maybe have a look through the patches in that bug, as that
will at least give you an idea of how I've been packaging some Ruby gems
recently.

1: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=34514#68

Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]> writes:

> I've never touched Ruby before, so I've got a bunch of questions:
>
> - Almost none of the tests pass.  Anyone knows what's going on?

I haven't checked the patch, but often the test suites are omitted from
the archives published to rubygems.org. This avoids users who use the
rubygems package manager from downloading the tests unnecessarily (as I
don't believe rubygems provides a way to run the tests), but obviously
doesn't suit packaging for Guix.

Fetching from the version control repository is a good way of getting
all the tests, but obviously that isn't what the gem importer generates.

> - ruby-sinatra 'install phase hangs forever (i.e. several minutes at
>   least).  I suspect an infinite loop, and it's quite weird this is
>   happening at the 'install phase.

I think theres a commit on the staging branch to pass the --verbose flag
to gem install, which may be revealing.

> - Should mailcatcher be packaged as "ruby-mailcatcher" or "mailcatcher"?

In my opinion, if you think someone might use it as a Ruby library,
stick with the ruby- prefix for consistency. Otherwise, call it what you
think makes most sense.

> - Mailcatcher seems to depend on older version of some packages,
>   e.g. version 1.0.9.1 of ruby-eventmachine.  What's the commended
>   procedure then?

If you're confident that the more recent versions of the dependencies
work, then I'd recommend patching the source to loosen the dependency
constraints.