Hi, > My guess is that atleast 50 gems from my gemlist.lock file would need > packaging or update. > However, GlitterGalley is not an app app but it is a web app. What I am > trying to say is that main > purpose of of GG is that it is hosted on cloud somewhere and people will use > to from web-browsers. > How important it is that gems I am using have rpm available? A good amount of > development time will > be wasted in packaging if this is a requirement.
Unfortunately this is truly difficult with Fedora, because every six months we update Ruby on Rails and many other gems. That means all packaged applications have to be updated as well. And that's why we have only one Rails app in Fedora. It's just too much effort. The reason why GlitterGalley would benefit from packaging is the distribution of the application. People could easily install it and run it (by starting SystemD unit for instance). The other one is that those people would get security updates for their application automatically with system updates (yum update) which they have to run anyway... so its a lot of work for the maintainer and least effort for people running it. With packages you can also easily ship SELinux policies, properly state all system dependencies etc. I would say the the biggest benefit is visible where you offer your application to your customers and you have to handle updates. For some just getting signed and security-tracked software is enough. For admins that means using the tooling they know, which means they don't even have to know Ruby and can deploy a Rails app by adding a repository, running yum install, search for config files using rpm, and start services as they know it. So yes, given there is just one instance of an application, you deploy several times a day, you track security issues yourself, you don't care about your software being signed by trusted authority, it's too much effort for little gain. For distributing secure and trusted applications this might be critical. But again, yes, shipping Rails applications on Fedora is time consuming (CentOS or RHEL would make it easier), but at the very least you learn how to write software with less dependencies :)). I actually wrote a thesis[0] about porting OBS application to Fedora (which has a Rails API) that might be helpful to you at this very moment. In the text part you can learn about Fedora RPM tooling (what tools we have and how they fit together) and also how to write a SELinux module for your application. Then you can look at the spec file itself[1]. I hope it will be help you. [0] http://is.muni.cz/th/325243/fi_m/thesis.pdf [1] https://github.com/strzibny/obs-for-fedora/blob/master/obs-server.spec Best Regards Josef _______________________________________________ ruby-sig mailing list [email protected] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/ruby-sig
