How to not collaborate with Debian (and upstream)

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday 28 August 2008 16:43, Mathias Gug wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 10:14:06AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > Besides the minor packaging strangeness in Neil's version (change of
> > packaging system, use of a git snapshot without saying it, copyright
> > problems, etc),
>
> Agreed. There are some packaging mistakes.
>
> > the root problem is the hack around update-alternatives
> > to remove the possibility for rubygems to overwrite binaries when
> > several versions of the same gem are installed (possibly for different
> > versions of ruby).
> >
> > * I don't think that this problem is grave enough to warrant maintaining
> >   a long term divergence with upstream in Debian/Ubuntu.
> >
> > * When discussed with upstream, they suggested a different solution
> >   (warn the user when rubygems is going to overwrite a binary).
>
> The upload tries to address one specific issue raised in bug 145267 [1]:
>
> Providing binaries shipped by gems on the default path.
>
> In hardy, the end user using a gem (let's say the rails gem) would
> have to do the following things:
>
> 1. sudo apt-get install rubygems
> 2. sudo gem install rails
> 3. Modify the default PATH in the environment to include
> /var/lib/gems/1.X/bin/ so that the rails command can be invoked from the
> command line.
>
> The upload aims at removing step number 3 from the process by symlinking
> the gem binary from /var/lib/gems/1.X/bin/ into /usr/local/bin/. This is
> accomplished by hooking calls to update-alternatives in the post-install
> phase of a gem. These hooks were added by the upstream developers in
> order to be able to do exactly that kind of things. Thus the reason to
> use an upstream snapshot.

However labling it an RC version when it's a snapshot is fundamentally 
deceptive, wrong, and not at all Ubuntu.  

> And that's all what the upload is trying to solve. Other concerns raised
> in this thread and other threads are valid - there were valid before the
> upload and are still valid after the upload. It's one step toward
> improving the end-user experience of rubygems in the next version of
> Ubuntu.
>
> [1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libgems-ruby/+bug/145267

Apparently all the concerns about this raised by numerous Ubuntu developers 
are irrelevent then?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/262063

It may 'solve' that problem but it raises much more sever possiblities.

Scott K