Status of the "rails" package in Ubuntu

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I’m an Ubuntu developer on the Ubuntu Server team.

I recently started a thread on the Ubuntu development mailing list that I’d like to draw your attention to. It relates to some maintenance difficulties we’re having with the rails package on Ubuntu, but also language-specific stacks generally and their interaction with language-specific module package managers and their repositories such as gem and RubyGems.org.

My opening post is here: Maintaining language-specific module package stacks and I’ll also paste this below for your reference. The discussion goes more into Rails in Steve’s reply here: Proposal: drop rails and its reverse-dependencies from Ubuntu 19.04 [Re: Maintaining language-specific module package stacks]

I’d appreciate input from the Rails community. In particular, it’d be great if we could find some common ground on what we recommend that users can expect and do.

Thanks,

Robie

For reference, here’s a copy of my original post:

I’d like to talk about addressing the difficulty in maintenance of long tail language-specific stacks in Ubuntu. For example, right now src:rails is stuck in disco-proposed[1]. It seems to me that we spend a disproportionate amount of effort trying to get this class of package migrated to the release pocket compared to the number of Ubuntu users who actually care and use them.

I suggest that:

  1. If a language-specific package, or stack of packages, is stuck in proposed, and nobody is volunteering to get them migrated, then we are more willing to delete them from the release pocket and release without that stack.

  2. We recommend, as a project, that users who wish to use these language stacks directly do so via the language-specific packaging tooling.

Background