RubyCocoa, ruby & rb-rubygems

[Eloy Duran]

Hello all,

I've had a couple of patches up for a while that add a universal variant
to ruby and rb-rubygems. I've added these because I wanted to update
the rb-cocoa port.

So this is a reminder for these patches:

ruby:
http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ticket/12314

rb-rubygems:
http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ticket/12317
http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ticket/12318

A draft of the rb-cocoa portfile is available at:
http://pastie.textmate.org/74998
But actually I would like to take over the maintainership for RubyCocoa.
I have send a email to Yuhei about this, but unfortunately haven't heard back.
Thing is that the current RubyCocoa port is pretty outdated and since
I'm one of the devs of RubyCocoa it might be easier for me to keep it
up-to-date.

Also if this would be possible I would like to deprecate the name
rb-cocoa in favor
of rb-rubycocoa. This was already discussed shortly with Ryan Schmidt, is there
an update on such functionality?

============================================================
> Now the last patch I have is the one for rubycocoa itself.
> But first I would like to now if it's allowed to change the name of
> the port?
> Because the name of the software is rubycocoa not cocoa....

I think this is still an undefined area. It would be nice if we could
just "svn mv rb-cocoa rb-rubycocoa" (if indeed consensus is that this
is a good idea) but this would be bad for all users who already have
rb-cocoa installed. They would not be informed that their port has
been renamed and they would never know if there are any updates
unless they later manually install rb-rubycocoa.

In some past cases, port authors have kept the portfile under the old
name and changed it in some way -- either so that it just outputs an
error message advising the user to install the other port, or going
so far as to automatically uninstall the old port and installing the
new one. The latter seems like a good idea from a user's ease-of-use
perspective but the implementation of this feature in those portfiles
was deemed scary because MacPorts has no support for this.

I think it would be beneficial for MacPorts to have portfile syntax
to say that a port has been superseded by a different port. This way
all ports like this could be handled identically. We could start with
something very simple: a new keyword for portfiles:

superseded_by           rb-rubycocoa

Anyone who tries to install this port gets a message that the port
has been replaced by this other one. Anyone who already has the old
port installed will see something in "port outdated", and if they try
to "port upgrade" the port, they'll get a message advising them to
uninstall the current port and install this new port. Then later, if
we want, we can look into a process of automatically uninstalling the
old port and installing the new one, but we don't need to think about
that now.
============================================================

Cheers,
Eloy