All, First let me apologize for the length of this mail. However, there are a number of issues and I want to make sure I do not leave out anything.
A while back I was engaged to package Active Record and Active Support into libactiverecord-ruby and libactivesupport-ruby for Debian and Ubuntu. At the time I created the initial packages, I noticed that Active Support shipped a vendor directory containing builder, memcache-client, tzinfo, and xml-simple. The builder and xml-simple were already packaged for Debian. The other two were not, so I went ahead and used the embedded sources from within libactiverecord-ruby, as that is how it was shipped. Later on, I realized that it would be better to package tzinfo and memcache-client into separate Debian packages, as using embedded sources is generally frowned upon in Debian. So, I created the libtzinfo-ruby and libmemcache-client-ruby packages. Right after the libtzinfo-ruby package was accepted, bug #503591 [0] was filed in the Debian BTS. The bug's title is "Please don't include yet another copy of tzdata in the archive". So, I am emailing you, the authors of tzinfo, ruby-tzfile, and activesupport, to see if there is a way that we can make this work so that activesupport can remain in Debian. (ruby-tzfile was recommended as a possibility by a user who sent a follow-up message to #503591) Here are three options: 1. Modify libactivesupport-ruby to use ruby-tzfile - Requires packaging ruby-tzfile into Debian (which I would do) - Requires modifying libactivesupport-ruby (could this be done upstream?) 2. Modify libactivesupport-ruby to use ruby-tzfile or tzinfo (depending on which is installed). - Same issues as above 3. Modify tzinfo to no longer embed the zone data and use the data from /usr/share/zoneinfo instead. - Requires modifying libtzinfo-ruby (could this be done upstream?) - May have impacts on other platforms at which tzinfo is targeted that do not ship zoneinfo (is this why the zone data are shipped embedded?) In any event, it is important to either remove libtzinfo-ruby's zone data files from Debian (or remove libtzinfo-ruby entirely). However, people are using libactivesupport-ruby in Debian and I would hate to see libactivesupport-ruby removed on account having to remove libtzinfo-ruby. So, one of libtzinfo-ruby or libactivesupport-ruby will need to be modified. Regards, -Roberto [0] http://bugs.debian.org/503591 -- Roberto C. Sánchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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