Ruby Gem package guidelines
CLR – Cross – Eclipse – Free Pascal – GNOME – Go – Haskell – Java – KDE – Kernel – Lisp – MinGW – Nonfree – OCaml – Perl – PHP – Python – Ruby – VCS – Web – Wine
Writing PKGBUILDs for software written in Ruby.
Contents
Package naming
For libraries, use ruby-$gemname. For applications, use the program name. In either case, the name should be entirely lowercase.
Always use ruby- prefix even if $gemname already starts with word ruby. It is needed to avoid future name clashes in case if a gem with shorter name appear. It also makes names more easily parseble by tools (think about PKGBUILD generators/version or dependency checkers, etc...). Examples: ruby-ruby-protocol-buffersAUR.
Versioned packages
If you need to add a versioned package then use ruby-$gemname-$version, e.g. ruby-builder-3.2.1. So rubygem dependency builder=3.2.1 will turn into ruby-builder-3.2.1 Arch package.
In case if you need to resolve "approximately greater" dependency ~> then package should use version without the last part, e.g. rubygem dependency builder~>3.2.1 will turn into ruby-builder-3.2. An exception for this rule is when "approximately greater" dependency matches the latest version of the gem - in this case avoid introducing a new versioned package and use just ruby-$gemname instead (the HEAD version).
Another problem with versioned packages is that it can conflict with other versions, e.g. because the packages install the same files in /usr/bin. One solution for this problem is that versioned packages should not install such files - only HEAD version package can do this.
Examples
For examples, please see ruby-rethinkdbAUR ruby-json_pureAUR ruby-hpricot.
Notes
Add --verbose to gem arguments to receive additional information in case of troubles.
Gotchas
Package contains reference to $pkgdir
Sometimes when you build the package you can see following warning WARNING: Package contains reference to $pkgdir. Some packed files contain absolute path of directory where you built the package. To find these files run cd pkg && grep -R "$(pwd)" . Most likely the reason will be hardcoded path in .../ext/Makefile.
After gem install is over the Makefile is not needed anymore. In fact none of the files in ext is needed and it can be completely removed by adding rm -rf "$pkgdir/$_gemdir/gems/$_gemname-$pkgver/ext" to package() function.
Example PKGBUILD
An example PKGBUILD can be found at /usr/share/pacman/PKGBUILD-rubygem.proto, which is in the abs package.
Automation
The gem installation can be automated completely with the tool pacgemAUR which creates a temporary PKGBUILD, calls makepkg and namcap. The resulting package is then installed with sudo pacman.
There is also gem2archAUR tools which aid in automating the process of creating a ruby gem PKGBUILD. Make sure to manually check the PKGBUILD after generation.