Gunnar Wolf

Today I attended RubyCamp (schedule available), organized by my friends at Instituto de Física, at my University. I presented three plugins I made and regularly use.

The organizers followed a short, more informal scheme than most conferences I am used to — Talk slots range between 5 and 15 minutes, so we attended a whole day of semi-lightning talks. Of course, many people have run late, and although there was quite a bit of free space in the schedule, it has been practically non-stop — I was thinking on also giving a talk on encodings (as many people really still don't understand what is UTF-8, what is Latin1, why all that mess — People, please learn at least The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)), but the schedule is full by now. Interesting and successful experiment, I'd say. The talks are being taped, and the organizers say they will be soon made available online.

There are many cultural details to note here. First of all, yes, the Rails Fanboys _are_ a cult/sect. I think we have ~90% of MacBooks... I still fail to understand why a coder feels at ease on MacOS. I deeply despise it! ☻ Also, most of this community have bitten the Twitter plague. This is also a community very much into businessspeak, speaking a word in English for each two words in Spanish (I try to be consistent, not mixing languages at least). Some conferences have been quite business- and enterpeneur-oriented. Although I should not complain too much about this, as it is an important aspect for many people — But I still don't feel at ease having talks on how to run a business if we were asked for presentations on technical aspects!

Anyway - I was quite happy to be here. This is the first real technical, code-oriented conference I have attended in a long time in Mexico. And we need more like this! We have too many entry-level, evangelization-oriented conferences, but very few like this one.

[update]: Group photo!

I am stunned no more people have been bitten by this. Or at least, the Intarweb has not heard about it. Censorship perhaps? I haven't researched more into the causes, but anyway...
I was pushing a project I have had lingering for some time from Rails 2.0.x to 2.1.x (yes, 2.2 is already out there, but 2.1 is the version that will ship with Lenny) - The changes should not be too invasive, as it is a minor release, but there are some quite noticeable changes.
Anyway... What was the problem? Take this very simple migration:

class CreatePeople < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :people do |t|
      t.column :login, :string, :null => false
      t.column :passwd, :string, :null => false
      t.column :firstname, :string, :null => false
      t.column :famname, :string, :null => false
      t.column :email, :string
 
      t.column :pw_salt, :string
      t.column :created_at, :timestamp
      t.column :last_login_at, :timestamp
    end
  end
 
  def self.down
    drop_table :people
  end
end

PGError: ERROR:  syntax error at OR near "("
LINE 1: ...serial PRIMARY KEY, "login" character varying(255)(255) NOT ...
                                                             ^
: CREATE TABLE "people" ("id" serial PRIMARY KEY, 
          "login" character varying(255)(255) NOT NULL, 
          "passwd" character varying(255)(255)(255) NOT NULL, 
          "firstname" character varying(255)(255)(255)(255) NOT NULL, 
          "famname" character varying(255)(255)(255)(255)(255) NOT NULL,
          "email" character varying(255)(255)(255)(255)(255)(255) DEFAULT NULL NULL,
          "pw_salt" character varying(255)(255)(255)(255)(255)(255)(255) DEFAULT NULL NULL, 
          "created_at" timestamp DEFAULT NULL NULL, "last_login_at" timestamp DEFAULT NULL NULL) 

This morning, I got a mail that made me very happy. I followed it up a bit, and some hours later, echoed it over the pkg-ruby-extras list. And, yes, a blog posting won't hurt :)
I have done some rantings on why it is so painful to integrate cultures such as Debian and Rails. Those rants were part of quite a large rant-net and attracted a fair share of traffic/comments over here. Flamefesting over your blog is fun! :-) but anyway, I am delighted to say that at least some people worth their weight in code were watching, interested.
The mail I got this morning (yes, follow the links above!) was from Hongli Lai, one of the very nice people at Phusion - The people behind Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Yes, people with a very different mindset to mine (specially when it comes to being a 100% Free Software person).
Hongli invited me to try their new DebGem service (still in Beta, although quite usable as it is). They are offering an auto-built full repository of Rubyforge, translated to Debian packages. They are currently supporting Debian 4.0 (Etch) and Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 (Intrepid and Hardy). And, yes, installing any arbitrary Ruby module is now just as easy as aptitude install libsomething-ruby. For over 20,000 Gems.
There is a catch, yes. The service is currently free, while they finish the public beta period. Their pricing is available.
Best luck to you guys. And... Shall you enjoy fierce competition from Debian proper! ;-)
[Update]: They just posted the official Beta announcement for DebGem

Thanks to some unexplained comments on some oldish entries on my blog, I found -with a couple of days of delay- Rubigem is from Mars, Apt-get is from Venus, in Pelle's weblog. And no, I have not yet read the huge amount of comments generated from it... Still, I replied with the following text - And I am leaving this blog post in place to remind me to further extend my opinions later on.
Wow... Quite a bit of comments. And yes, given that the author wrote a (very well phrased and balanced) post, I feel obliged to reply. But given that he refered to me first, I'll just skip the chatter for later - I'm tired this time of day ;-)
Pelle, I agree with you - This problem is because we are from two very different mindsets. I have already said so - http://www.gwolf.org/soft/debian+rails is a witness to that point.
But I do not think the divide is between sysadmins and developers. I am a developer that grew from the sysadmin stance, but that's not AFAICT that much the fact in Debian.
Thing is, in a distribution, we try to cater for common users. I have a couple of Rails apps under development that I expect to be able to package for Debian, and I think can be very useful for the general public.
Now, how is the user experience when you install a desktop application, in whatever language/framework it is written? You don't care what the platform is - you care that it integrates nicely with your environment. Yes, the webapp arena is a bit more difficult - but we have achieved quite a bit of advance in that way. Feel like using a PHP webapp? Just install it, and it's there. A Python webapp? Same thing. A Perl webapp? As long as you don't do some black magic (and that's one of the main factors that motivated me away from mod_perl), the same: Just ask apt-get to install it and you are set.
But... What about installing a Rails application? From a package manager? For a user who does not really care about what design philosophy you followed, who might not even know what a MVC pattern is?
Thing is, distributions aim at _users_. And yes, I have gradually adopted a user's point of view. I very seldom install anything not available as a .deb - and if I do, I try to keep it clean enough so I can package it for my personal use later on.
Anyway... I will post a copy of this message in my blog (http://gwolf.org/), partly as a reminder to come back here and read the rest of the buzz. And to go to the other post referenced here. And, of course, I invite other people involved in Ruby and Debian to continue sharing this - I am sure I am not the only person (or, in more fairness, that Debian's pkg-ruby-extras team is not the only team) interested in bridging this huge divide and get to a point we can interact better - And I am sure that among the Rubyists many people will also value having their code usable by non-developers as well.

Wouter insists that Ruby Gems are enough of an argument to keep Rails at a distance. Even though I agree with the basic claim and think that Gems are basically insane and sick, this should be taken a bit more under perspective.
We are blessed. We are blessed to have Debian, such a rich OS with such a great package management system, and with superb integration between so many packages. Blessed are also the users of most Free Software based distributions, as they share the advantages of systems growing with full consciousness of their interaction's benefits. However, integration with the rest of the world is not seamless.
Most scripting languages have their own infrastructure for managing the modules/libraries/pacakges/whatevers dependencies. Perl has CPAN, PHP has PEAR, Ruby has Gems... I do see Gems as the most obnoxious of them all, but the basics are the same.
The Rails crowd started being Unix-centric, but the Windows (and MacOS - they are no better, believe me, at least in this regard) world has exerted its pressure. Gems caters very well to their needs, but we do suffer the integration at the distro side.
The only sane way the propietary-minded people have managed to stay clear of the well known "DLL hell" is to ship everything a given program requires bundled together - that's the main reason for the bloat of lots of applications, and for the sloppiness of security support. Every application packager is responsible for shipping updated versions to any library it bundles in, except for the very basic core that the OS itself provides. That seems so annoyingly backwards to us that... it is unbelievable.
So, yes, Rails application trees often include Rails itself. For $DEITY sake, even I have grown used to working that way, as things tend to break under your nose otherwise. My proposal (which we talked over at DebConf, but have not pushed so far) is to support simultaneous versions of Rails installed in a Debian system (of course, via different packages), more or less in the way that simultaneous versions of Ruby, PHP or Python (and, in some limited fashion, Perl - Although Perl does not suffer from this incompatible bumps. Yay for Perl!) can be installed.
...And, yes, together with the pkg-ruby-extras team, I have been trying to -slowly, yes- package whatever modules we often use so they don't have to be included in Rails applications.
So far, the best way (although by far not optimal) I have found to limit this explosion of trees is to include most libraries in my Rails application trees as git submodule trees - If they are not explicitly downloaded, the systemwide libraries will be used.
Yes, the "ship the whole thing as a bundle" approach is quite annoying. However, at least I must acknowledge that it works better than the approach I took with previous (mod_perl-based) webapps I wrote... As relatively few people grok mod_perl, I ended up with quite some apps which were not installed by anybody but me. Rails is obnoxious... but seems to be parsable by the humanity at large.