[katello-devel] Bundler vs rpm-gems

[Petr Chalupa]

Hi,

as Ivan and Lukas said on mail-list, I had some ideas how to solve our 
bundler/rpm issues. Then I had discussion with Ivan and Mirek and here 
is the proposed solution.

== Requirements

When installing on fedora/rhel in production. Do not mess with the 
production setup, rpm gems are used, 'bundle install' wont install 
anything else.

When installing on fedora/rhel in development. 'bundle install' prefers 
rpm-gems even if there is a newer gem in our gem-repo [2]. Additional 
development dependencies are installed.

When installing on any other system (Debian, Ubuntu, Mac, ...) in 
development. 'bundle install' installs the same versions of gems as 
would be installed on fedora. Optionally (at least made it possible in 
the future) 'bundle install' installs not only the same versions but 
also gems including security fixes included in rpm-gems.

== Proposal

I'll add monkey patch to katello/master for bundler which will ensure 
that rpm-gems are preferred (even if they are older than gems in a 
gem-repo). It's based on bkabrda's patch [1].

I'll ensure that our gem repo [2] contains all gems needed for katello 
development (some are still missing). This enables katello (rails app) 
to be installed on any system without rubygems.org.

I would like to work on this in the next iteration. Also I would like to 
explore how difficult would be to create gem versions with security 
patches (which is important for non fedora development - me).

We also discussed it would be nice to move our gem-repo to github a 
publish it on pages.github. The repo would be more visible. It would 
allow us to use pull-requests for tracking new gem-dependencies. It 
would be on one place.

Petr

[1] https://gist.github.com/2875212
[2] http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/katello/gems/