Last updated on Sat Aug 07 12:00:00 CEST 2004
100+ Ruby libraries and applications in the Ruby Production Archive
rpa-base 0.2.0 has been released. In order to prove that the Ruby Production Archive (RPA) approach is practical, I created over 100 packages: all of Rubyforge’s "top sellers" (Rails, Rake, RedCloth, Active Record, SQLite, Log4R, Copland, ruvi, to name a few) and many others: take a look at the full list of packaged software. This means that it is now possible to do
  rpa install instiki rake rails ruvi    # or any of the other 100+ libs/apps

and get these packages plus all their dependencies installed in one go, and atomically (no garbage left, guaranteed), on a number of platforms (rpa-base has been tested on OSX, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, older RH, Win32: XP, 2K, cygwin and "Pragmatic installer", etc…)

A number of movies show rpa-base in action, while installing Instiki, Rake, Rlimit (a C extension), Rails, etc… I have some funny videos where syck crashes and rpa-base recovers just fine :)… I am fully expecting other projects to mimic the usage of animations to showcase apps, which I originally stole from Rails, especially since I have created them with yet another small Ruby script.

RPA is a very ambitious project and I could really use some help. Here are some of the areas that need to be worked on:

  • packaging (new software and package maintenance)
  • website development (should provide package indexes, QA section, bugtracking, etc)
  • setting up a permanent repository infrastructure
  • cross-compilation and build automation

The 2 first ones in particular can be carried out with relative independence from rpa-base… I’d be really happy if you dropped a message to <batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com> (adding RPA to the subject will help get it past the spam filtering ;) or contacted me via IRC, batsman @ #ruby-lang on freenode.net.

 

Copyright © MJFP
batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com