Hello Andreas Thank you for your research.
The standard gems are indeed a source of confusion both in Ruby distribution and in Arch packages. One thing that could really help here is a working proposal with a patch to PKGBUILD. If you can come up with one please file an arch bug and share it with me so I can look at it. On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 10:45 AM Andreas 'Segaja' Schleifer < seg...@archlinux.org> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > while trying to package the ruby framework rails [0] I stumbled over the > fact that ruby itself is shipping an assortment of "default gems" which > they call "Standard Library" [1] [2] > and something called "Bundled Gems" [3], which is another set of "default > gems". > The problem I see in these gems is that they are pulled into the ruby > source repo [4] from their dedicated original sources before a ruby release > and then get used in the release. > Furthermore ruby itself does not release a new version of itself whenever > a gem of this standard library updates, which means that over time sooner > or later most of these gems in the bundle > will be out-of-date. > Now apparently ruby has a general solution for that. You can have multiple > versions of one gem installed, the "default" versions do show up with a > default prefix in the `gem list` output. > > So much for the actual ruby state. Now I would like to highlight some > points I found out about how Arch Linux is packaging ruby and the issues I > see with it. > > Our ruby package [5] is currently removing a total of nine pre-shipped > gems from the main ruby release with the comment that they are shipped in > seperate packages [6]. > I recently checked and found out that three of these removed gems are not > provided as packages (anymore?). Namely rbs, typerof and erb. > Furthermore the PKGBUILD has code in there which states that it removes > *all* bundled gems to avoid conflicts [7], but when I run a `gem list | > grep 'default'` I still see the default gems. > After some research I found out the reason is because the path in which > the default gems are located are not the path that we are removing with > these three lines of code. > It could be that the location of these default gems changed in some > version and was never updated. > > The problem I see in the current situation is that we have most of the > default gems still installed and then some of them get upgraded (sometimes > even to a higher major version) by dedicated packages. > This can potentially break dependency changes if one of the not upgraded > default gems is requiring the gem that was upgraded to a new major version. > > From my point of view the only real fix for this is to make sure that we > again remove all the default gems so that they can be packaged seperatly. > Whether or not we want to provide all gems from the > "standard library" and "bundled gems" is then a different question and > would in the end require more ruby packages. > Also I would recomment to add a comment to the PKGBUILD file of these gems > stating that they are part of the "standard library" / "bundled gems" and > such shouldn't be dropped from the repos in the future. > > We also could think about putting all the "standard library" gems (and > maybe even the "bundled gems") in a package group called "ruby-stdlib" or a > meta-package (which I think is better). > That way users could easily install all of them with one command and we > also know which packages belong to the "ruby standard library". > > One side effect I see with this approach is that we currently have "hidden > dependencies" on some of the standard library gems like in case of > ruby-nokogiri [8], which is depending on ruby-racc which is not listed in > the PKGBUILD file. > Currently this package only works because racc is one of the gems in the > standard library [9] and such pre-installed. If we now cleanup the ruby > package we need to fix such issues. > > > Best regards > Segaja > > > [0] https://rubyonrails.org/ > [1] https://rubyreferences.github.io/rubyref/stdlib.html > [2] https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-3.1.2/ > [3] https://rubyreferences.github.io/rubyref/stdlib/bundled.html > [4] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/tree/master/lib > [5] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ruby/ > [6] > https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/ruby/trunk/PKGBUILD#L56-L79= > [7] > https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/ruby/trunk/PKGBUILD#L81-L84= > [8] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/71500 > [9] > https://rubyreferences.github.io/rubyref/stdlib/string-utilities/racc.html >
