The Debian/Ruby Teams

The Debian/Ruby teams maintain the Ruby interpreters, libraries and applications. There are actually two different Ruby teams in Debian:

Most discussions happen on the debian-ruby mailing list. Discussions specific to pkg-ruby-extras also happen on the pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers list. You should be subscribed to both if you want to follow Ruby in Debian.

We also use IRC (#debian-ruby on irc.debian.org) quite a lot.

pkg-ruby

How you can help:

pkg-ruby-extras

How you can help:

Mid- and Long-term tasks

Backports

{*} Provide backports for the key Ruby packages (interpreter, rubygems) for both Debian and Ubuntu stable releases.

Revamp the libraries packaging helper

{*}{*}{*}{*} Our current approach is based on cdbs, and duplicates a lot of code between binary packages when we provide both 1.8 and 1.9.X packages. It would be much better if we only had one package when the library works with both. Also, we need somehow to work with rubygems (this is a bit too hard currently). The approach could be:

Many things need to be well thought, like how to handle dependencies. Which makes this task quite hard to approach.

Use the alternatives system

{*}{*}{*} The alternatives system would allow to easily switch between Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9.X (instead of the current "/usr/bin/ruby is a symlink to ruby1.8" approach). However, this requires rethinking how we package Ruby applications and libraries, to make sure that those that only work with one particular Ruby version will be correctly treated. We cannot just break them all.