GSOC 2014/Student Application Axilleas/Isitfedoraruby

Proposal

isitfedoraruby.com is a web-application built with Ruby on Rails, that keeps track of the Fedora/Ruby integration, especially gem -> rpm conversion.

The project was started on 2012 as a Google Summer Of Code project by User:Zuhao and later were added some new features during the Google Code In program. This is my idea of enhancing it from a packager's point of view.

An overview of your proposal

isitfedoraduby is a nice project that never got the attention it deserved. I believe this is because it serves merely as a portal of the gems packaged for Fedora, showing their statuses and some nice statistics and graphs.

Being a packager myself for almost a year now, I am familiar with the difficulties one has to overcome in order to package a gem. This idea aims to facilitate the packaging process by providing some new tools and promote the site among Fedora ruby packagers.

In particular, I have in mind to:

• refactor the base code where needed
• write rspec tests
• enhance the gemfile_tool
• implement a feature of gem/app packaging progress bar
• show better formatted dependency checker
• create a page with stats preview of a gem not yet packaged
• use polisher gem where needed
• write documentation and how-to guides of rubygem packaging
• UI - UX changes

I will try to expand below each item.

The need you believe it fulfills

These enhancements will hopefully promote the site usage among Fedora ruby packagers and attract new ones.

For new packagers

Based on my experience as a new rubygem packager a year ago, I have compiled some useful information for the packaging process that would help new users to engage in ruby packaging much quicker than I did. You can read a draft here. This will be accessed through a special docs page on isitfedoraruby.com and could be edited with pull requests in the github repo.

I also plan to document the workflow a packager follows to build/update a gem, the tools needed to achieve this and the ones that would make the process easier, e.g. using the polisher gem and its binaries.

Of course documentation is not the only important thing, new packagers could also use the advanced features I describe below.

For existing packagers

The new enhancement that I have in mind for the gemfile_tool will help packagers that want to package an application with many dependencies. For example, Gitorious and GitLab are two big rails projects with over 100 dependencies each. The way gemfile_tool is now implemented isn't of much use. Using the polisher gem we can enhance it to depict the dependencies in a nice format (table maybe), export to json, display only the runtime dependencies, etc.

A rough timeline for your progress

21/03 - 18/08

Have you communicated with a potential mentor? If so, who?

Yes, User:vondruch