Ruby on Rails support in Intrepid - call for reviewers and cheerleaders

[Neil Wilson]

With the Intrepid Feature Freeze deadline fast approaching (August
28th) I thought I'd put out another call for help reviewing the
Phusion Passenger package and alterations to the Rubygems package.
Without your help reviewing the code, this will not go into Intrepid
and Ubuntu will be short of effective Rails support for yet another
cycle.

Even if Ruby isn't your first love, can I ask for your help to break
the logjam. I have a feeling we're in a bit of a chicken and egg
scenario here: there is nobody with review privileges who knows much
about Ruby and Rails, so nothing with Ruby and Rails every gets looked
at, so there is nobody with review privileges who knows much about
Ruby and Rails.

Phusion Passenger is a module for Apache that supports both Ruby on
Rails and other Rack based Ruby frameworks. It also has experimental
support for Python WSGI applications. The packaging bug is here
(https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/246719). I need reviews
and acks in REVU please to get this uploaded.

Rubygems contains 'gem' - the Ruby Package manager. Ruby on Rails is a
gem based framework and is completely integrated with the gem package
manager. In Intrepid I would expect users to continue to use gem to
install Rails and for that to be feasible we need a Rubygems package
that works as people expect it to work. I have implemented a patch
that uses the alternatives system so that we can have gem install
binaries in the $PATH without gem and apt running into each other and
without violating Debian policy.  This will close a long standing bug
(https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/145267).

I've been working closely with the Rubygems upstream team and the
package is based on the latest source code from their repository which
will be released as Rubygems 1.3.0 very shortly. Getting this into
Intrepid will mean that it has the very latest Rubygems containing
User based gem support, which is required so that Rails' automatic gem
installation tasks work correctly.

You can find the latest build of the packages at the Ubuntu Ruby team
archives here: https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-ruby. Both packages
are on the REVU system as well.

If you are just a user of Ubuntu and Ruby and would like better Rails
and Gem support, please make yourself heard and perhaps even join the
Ubuntu ruby group. I want to know what you think and what you want
from Ubuntu Ruby, Rails and Gems.

-- 
Neil Wilson