fedora

The Fedora Ruby SIG is in the process of updating the main Ruby package in Fedora to Ruby 1.9. We hope to get it in by Fedora 17, while shipping a Ruby 1.8 compatability package for those who wish to continue using the older version (though more and more upstream projects are phasing this out). Alternatively, since JRuby is now in Fedora, end-users may opt to utilize that interpreter for both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 support.

The Ruby 1.9 effort is being led by Vit Ondruch who has done alot of the packaging work and submitted the initial guidelines draft, which we are currently discussing/revising on the mailing lists. They are largely an extension of the existing guidelines to better nail things down and cover various issues that have come up over the years, but all are welcome to join the discussion and share their comments / opinions on the best way to move forward.

A Ruby 1.9.3 testing repository has been setup for those who wish to try the new packages out. Feel free to share any feedback or issues on list.

It's been a while since I've done a Linux hardware review. Having just got a Lenovo Thinkpad T520, figure it's about time for another :-)

Here's the breakdown:

That's about it, besides the small hickups w/ the root FS and touchpad-scrolling installation went as smooth as possible and everything worked out of the box. Even after I did a pre-install re-partitioning w/ gparted, Windows 7 still boot up as well, so that's an additional plus.

This is my first Thinkpad and it is really looking to be as Linux friendly as everyone says they are.

Try this one out.

$ wget http://yum.morsi.org/aeolus/cloud.rb
$ sudo ruby cloud.rb

You will be prompted for cloud provider credentials, instances to create on all those providers, and repos and packages to use on those instances. All using Aeolus framework tooling.

Doesn't get much simpler than that huh? :-D

Also checkout the screencast of the tooling in action. It's my first screencast so its a bit rough (especially around the audio and transitions) but it should convey enough of an overview of how Aeolus currently works to get you started (feel free to ask any questions)

Enjoy!

It's been a long ways coming, but JRuby has finally shipped in Fedora starting w/ F16. Feel free to grab it directly from the repos and take it for a spin!

Many thanks to akurtakov and everyone else who was involved in the review process.

Tonight we're going to be having a friendly battle of the distros at the Syracuse Linux User's Group. Essentially its just a chance for people to come together and talk about their favorite Linux distributions and what they like the most about them.

I will be representing Fedora tonight (see my talking points after the jump below) and I invite everyone who is in the area to attend!

Just a quick update, both Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.8 are now official in and will be shipping with Fedora 14. Many thanks to those who helped for all their hard work, and for those relying on these rpms please testing your software and systems to ensure compatibility and prevent any surprises if/when you upgrade. Feel free to report any issues you find (and please do if you find them).

I'm going to be putting development on these on hold for a little while while I work on other things, namely my main project deltacloud (make sure to check it out, the team has done alot of great work on it and it's coming along nicely) and getting jruby and passenger into Fedora. I intend to get back to this eventually, to help Jeroen with the parallel installable Ruby 1.9 work and figuring out a strategy for Rails 3.0.0 support. Until then, have fun!

The Phusion Passenger Fedora package submission has been open for nearly two years running. Many various issues have been resolved since the original submission (many thanks to all those involved for their hard work), but there is one last major blocker which is proving to be a headache for this process.

Namely passenger vendorizes the boost thread library. This is done to add some additional features (see the bugzilla issue, I won't go into details here) but this is unacceptable for Fedora, and thus until it is removed, rubygem-passenger can't be included. The idea behind this rule is that if a library releases some security or other updates, we manually have to include those in each project that vendorizes it.

As indicated by an upstream developer, passenger should work against the stock boost shipped with Fedora, albeit without some of the additional features. But since the change would be fairly invasive and those features would be removed, they are going to enforce their trademark on "phusion passenger" and insist it be renamed to something else if we make these changes. Of course they are within their legal right to do so though IMHO (and this is my opinion only) this may cause some reluctance to adopt passenger as one of the strongest points pertaining to FOSS is the ability to redistribute code easily with as few barriers as possible.

So this is where we are, should we choose to patch passenger to work against the stock boost, we will have to rename it, else we will not be able to ship passenger at all (without a FESCo exception, which is unlikely for these reasons). Granted while you can still get it via gem, this is not acceptable for all deployment scenarios, and it would be good to have it in Fedora regardless.

This is one of those issues where both sides are correct for their own reasons, and there is no intrinsically right or wrong answer, just different approaches / ideologies. Any thoughts? (looking for solutions acceptable to everyone, no flamewars)

I am pleased to release a Fedora 12 based appliance complete w/ a stack of rpms built against and related to Ruby 1.9.1.

This was built using Polisher, which I improved extensively and configured to generate various RPMs and yum repos. There are now many more rpms being generated/hosted since my last announcement, and after alot of work I finally got ruby-shadow to compile against Ruby 1.9.1. The packages themselves were built in mock, and made use of Polisher's project dependency support, so that projects built against the 'devel' repo were being built against the Ruby 1.9 package that resided there.

To make use of the appliance, download and extract the tarball, and run 'virt-image' on the polisher-devel.xml file (you will need the appliance tools installed). This will take care of all the work for you, you can then just open virt-manager, virt-viewer, or any other virt client and use a Ruby 1.9.1 build for Fedora!

Many thanks go out to those on ruby-sig for all the work to support Ruby on Fedora, especially Jeroen for the Ruby 1.9.1 spec file (and all the other work/research) which I initially based this of off. There were several other changes that went into it as issues were discovered, particularily some patches from Ruby 1.8.6 had to be readded to fix issues, and care had to be taken due to the fact that rubygems and rake were both merged into the official Ruby project stating in Ruby 1.9 (right now I figured the easiest way to handle this was to change those packages to be empty and just depend on / pull in the Ruby rpm).

There is still alot more work to do, eg nits w/ a few of the specific scripts, support for more projects, and a working Ruby 1.8.7 appliance (the maintenance repo and 1.8.7 specfile are still a work in progress). But what is there is a very easy way to run Ruby 1.9 natively on Fedora, and to start testing various software stacks. Until the next update, I leave you with this, a screenshot of Fedora 12 running a ruby-gnome app built/running against Ruby 1.9 (source code is attached to this post). Enjoy!

Quick Fedora tip (thanks to nirik on #fedora-devel). If you are unorphaning a package and you've made it all the way to 'make build' each CVS branch you want into import into Fedora, just to get the following error from Koji:

2030661 build (dist-f13-updates-candidate, /cvs/pkgs:rpms/joni/F-13:joni-1_1_3-4_fc13): open (x86-01.phx2.fedoraproject.org) -> FAILED: BuildError: package joni is blocked for tag dist-f13-updates-candidate

You need to file a bug w/ the release engineering trac system to get your package unblocked. Here is my joni ticket for example

After it is unblocked, 'make build' should work, and you can submit any updates via bodhi.

Happy hacking!