#984462 RFH: open-build-service

#984462#5
Date:
2021-03-03 20:15:13 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

While I don’t work on the OBS package in Debian, I know about the state
of the package in Debian right now: the team, and most notably the main
maintainer, Andrew Lee, need help to maintain this package, as it
requires a lot of work due to a combination of Ruby / Ruby on Rails,
Perl and shell bits. Ruby parts specifically is a pain point, since
there’s a lot of gems this package depends on and updating one or
multiple of them can break OBS in ways the upstream didn’t think about.

The package has already missed Buster and Bullseye, and if the situation
doesn’t improve, it may result in a removal at some point.

Unfortunately, I lack necessary knowledge of the Ruby ecosystem to be
able to meaningfully help myself, but this package needs more people to
work on it, so if you can help, please consider doing so.

Thanks!

#984462#10
Date:
2021-03-04 21:31:21 UTC
From:
To:
Hello,

For the Ruby gems issue, bundling those as in Kubernetes resolution[0]
might be a way forward.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/835599/

#984462#15
Date:
2022-06-05 10:58:22 UTC
From:
To:
$ reverse-depends -b ruby-uglifier
Reverse-Build-Depends
* open-build-service

$ reverse-depends ruby-uglifier
Reverse-Depends
* diaspora
* gitlab
* obs-api

diaspora and gitlab I plan to fix (gitlab is fixed already in
experimental but will take time for a reupload to unstable).

Last unstable upload of open-build-service/obs-api is 2020-04-13 and
already has two unfixed rc bugs and a request for help
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=984462

If maintaining all ruby gem dependencies is the main problem, then may
be a mixed approach of using unpackaged gems from rubygems.org and
moving to contrib section could work.

You can see https://salsa.debian.org/ruby-team/pupilfirst as example of
this approach (this would not require a lot of ruby specific knowledge).
https://salsa.debian.org/ruby-team/pupilfirst/-/blob/master/debian/postinst#L87

You just need to set GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH variables for bundler to
install unpackaged gems.

#984462#20
Date:
2022-06-05 18:17:01 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

We (Collabora) stopped using OBS from Debian packages and switched to our own Docker images completely, which use Rubygems.org instead. Since we were effectively the maintainers of the Debian packages, and nobody else volunteered to maintain OBS in Debian, I’m going to remove most of it except the worker code, which is really tiny and needs virtually no maintenance. (There’s also a related package, obs-build, unaffected by this.)

I’m preparing an upload to the OBS package to implement this.

[0]: https://gitlab.collabora.com/obs/open-build-service