Alexandria broken on Ubuntu 11.10
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I've put up a nicely-formatted version of this message on the
Alexandria website:
http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/news/2011-11-07--ubuntu.html
But I'll include the text version here for convenience (and the
mailing-list archive).
Alexandria has been removed from the Ubuntu package repositories for
the new 11.10 (oneiric) release. This is because the alexandria package
depends on old ruby-gnome2 packages which have been dropped from Ubuntu.
The reasons behind this are a little complex, and took me a while to
work out, so I shall go through them.
* In the course of developing GTK+3, the GTK+ developers decided to
tidy up [1] libraries of unrelated modules. So, for example, libgnome
was refactored and classes like Gnome::Program were pulled out into
Gtk::Application in the main libgtk library. Similarly, the
functionality of libglade2 is now provided by Gtk::Builder. And use
of libgconf2 is discouraged (without any simple drop-in replacement,
as far as I can tell so far).
* The Ruby/GNOME2 team, with limited resources, cannot keep supporting
soon-to-be discontinued libraries. So, coming up to their recent
1.0.0 release, they marked [2] libgnome2-ruby, libgconf2-ruby and
libglade2-ruby (and many others) as deprecated. This means [3]
“considered obsolete but still available for use, though planned to
be phased out”.
* Debian dropped [4] all the deprecated packages from Debian Testing in
July 2011, since they are “unmaintained upstream”. This also meant
that any packages which depended upon them had to be dropped,
including Alexandria. [5]
* Ubuntu, which takes most of its software packages from Debian,
followed suit in not including the deprecated Ruby/GNOME2 packages,
and therefore also had to drop Alexandria in the 11.10 release. [6]
Since the three deprecated packages Alexandria needs have been removed
from the Ubuntu repositories, any attempt to simply install the latest
Alexandria deb package will fail due to broken dependencies.
Therefore, to get Alexandria up and running on Ubuntu again I must do
some combination of these:
* Re-write parts of Alexandria so it no longer requires those libraries.
* Re-package some dependencies and make them available on the
Alexandria Team PPA.
This is the current plan. Where possible, I will use re-writing, which
should lead to fewer maintenance worries in the future. Keep an eye on
the mailing-list [7] for progress reports.
How did I miss this?
* I haven't been working on Alexandria for many months.
* I don't use the latest Ubuntu. I use Trisquel GNU/Linux, which is
based upon an older version of Ubuntu.
* I'm not subscribed to any of the relevant Debian mailing-lists to
which notifications were sent.
* The Debian maintainers of Alexandria
did not contact the Alexandria mailing-list or leave a bug report on
the tracker on RubyForge. So I had no knowledge of the problem until
#29415 [8], #29418 [9], and #29419 [10] were posted on the tracker a
few days ago.
- Cathal Mc Ginley
[1] http://live.gnome.org/LibgnomeMustDie
[2] http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/980605
[3] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deprecated
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-ruby/2011/07/msg00049.html
[5] http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/alexandria.html
[6] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot
[7] http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/alexandria-list/
[8] http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=865&aid=29415&group_id=205
[9] http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=863&aid=29418&group_id=205
[10] http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=863&aid=29419&group_id=205
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