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.
Any relevant experience you have
How you intend to implement your proposal
Refactor basecode where needed
Write tests
The current test suite is almost non-existent. I will use:
- rspec for models/controllers
- factory_girl for feeding tests
- capybara to simulate users' interaction with the app
- selenium-webdriver to test javascript interactions
For views I will use feature specs. Existing minitest tests will be replaced with rspec ones.
As a first step, I will make a list of things that need testing, as well as reporting some existing bugs that will be added to the tests to avoid future repetition.
Enhance gemfile_tool
That would be really awesome as it would really facilitate the work done by someone who wants to package a gem with many deps or a rails app like GitLab or Gitorious that Ken is on. Now, with the work you have done in polisher that would be easier to implement. I was thinking that it could even speak to the API (supposedly there is one) and with the help of mediawiki-gateway [0] it would spit a table like the one I have for GitLab [1] (I use semi-automatic methods for now). It could also spit some json format like the one I create here [2]. And the list goes on
Packaging progress of a rails app or a gem
A separate page that shows the packaging progress of a gem will be provided.
Scenario
The packager submits a Pull Request on the issue tracker providing a yml file. When the patch gets merged and deployed to production, a new page will be created depicting the packaging progress of this certain gem.
Implementation
The yml file will contain information of the gem name as per the review request and the bugzilla issue number. Each time the gem page gets loaded, it will query koji for rawhide builds and bugzilla for any Blocks issues. If we have those two values we can calculate how many dependents gems there are not yet or already packaged.
A nice progress bar with the percentage of gem packaging completion will be provided as well. For each gem that gets in rawhide, the progress bar gets a little further. There can also be a number of other cool info in the page, like links to bugzilla requests so that someone could lend a hand, etc.
TODO Add mockup or scrot(ex from gitlab's milestone)
Future enhancement
At first I will focus on implementing this for a single gem but later it can be extended to track the progress of a rails app.
Enhance dependency checker
I wish I had a tool like that last year... Showing the deps in a more elaborate way, that would make my packaging a lot easier. Now it presents gems' dependencies in a tree and that's cool, but I'd love to enhance it and show them in a table format like:
gem1
|- gem2
|- gem3
|- gem4
Also, it currently depicts the tree of gems already packaged. What if I wanted to see a gem's dependencies not yet in the repos? Actually that would be a good addition to polisher
Special pages
Pages that would help the user experience are:
- list of gems pending review
- list of gems already assigned but stagnated for too long
- list of gems pending review and marked as NEEDSPONSOR
TODO elaborate
Show info of gems to be packaged
Right now, the fedoraruby app shows information only about packaged gems.
RSS feeds
TODO rss for one's packages with categories:
- not up-to-date
- pending review
- etc
A rough timeline for your progress
21/03 - 18/08
Any other details you feel we should consider
Have you communicated with a potential mentor? If so, who?
Yes, User:vondruch