Any reason not merging this upstream ncursesw-ruby?

[avtobiff]

Hi!

I am packaging Sup for Debian and have switched ruby-ncurses Debian package to use the ncursesw-ruby upstream, thus enabling wide characters by default.

What is the motivation behind this fork? Why not merge it upstream?

Best,
Per

[gauteh]

Do you mean this one: https://rubygems.org/gems/ncursesw? It is outdated and the gem is un-maintained. It fails on Mac OS X and also had problems on FreeBSD, we made modifications to the wrapper so that some warnings and non-explicit casting were corrected.

Version 1.3.0 of ncursesw-ruby was released in 2011, but the gem still has not been updated.

Some of the initial discussion for doing this was here: sup-heliotrope/sup#18

[avtobiff]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Gaute Hope [email protected] wrote:

Do you mean this one: https://rubygems.org/gems/ncursesw? It is outdated and the gem is un-maintained. It fails on Mac OS X and also had problems on FreeBSD, we made modifications to the wrapper so that some warnings and non-explicit casting were corrected.

Yes, this seems to be the same upstream as the one you forked on GitHub.

I think the modifications made are solid.

Version 1.3.0 of ncursesw-ruby was released in 2011, but the gem still has not been updated.

I understand. Maybe it is possible to have them merged some way.

I opened an issue on this: rlane#3.

[gauteh]

@rlane used to maintain sup, but not anymore. rlane#2 was submitted by @foobacca (one of the current maintainers), but it seems like he has abandoned the gem and his repo. It is unlikely that it will be updated. That is also why we forked the repo to the sup-heliotrope organization, so that the gem would not be dependent on one maintainer.

If we want something merged, then it should go into http://developer.berlios.de/projects/ncurses-ruby, but we have now dropped some of the non-wide-ncurses functionality (and stopped testing it), so I don't know if it is of interest upstream.

Anyway, there doesn't seem to be an official gem of the bindings (http://developer.berlios.de/projects/ncurses-ruby).

[gauteh]

Just read rlane#3 properly, I support your suggestion: one ncursesw-ruby gem with our changes would be the best. Basically replacing ncursesw-ruby with ncursesw-sup and removing ncursesw-sup.

[gauteh]

I see that upstream (berlios) is basically unmaintained as well: http://developer.berlios.de/support/?func=detailsupport&support_id=103364&group_id=273

[avtobiff]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Gaute Hope [email protected] wrote:

Just read rlane#3 properly, I support your suggestion: one ncursesw-ruby gem with our changes would be the best. Basically replacing ncursesw-ruby with ncursesw-sup and removing ncursesw-sup.

Yes! This was indeed what I was aiming for. :-)

but we have now dropped some of the non-wide-ncurses functionality (and stopped testing it), so I don't know if it is of interest upstream.

In Debian we use ncursesw-ruby to provide both ruby-ncurses and ruby-ncursesw.
What non-wide-ncurses functionality have you dropped?

[gauteh]

Hm, we don't check for ncurses anymore, only ncursesw. We haven't dropped any of the functions, but we don't compile against regular ncurses (it would probably work though..). Maybe I was a bit mistaken and we haven't really made any changes to that from ncursesw-ruby at: http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=273

just noticed there is a separate ncurses-ruby (no wide) there.

[avtobiff]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Gaute Hope [email protected] wrote:

Hm, we don't check for ncurses anymore, only ncursesw. We haven't dropped any of the functions, but we don't compile against regular ncurses (it would probably work though..). Maybe I was a bit mistaken and we haven't really made any changes to that from ncursesw-ruby at: http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=273

just noticed there is a separate ncurses-ruby (no wide) there.

This was exactly what we did in Debian also. We only provide a ncurses gem with
wide support (ncursesw.rb), which is also symlinked to ncurses.rb.

[gauteh]

Ok, then it should be good to go for release as ncursesw. And you should be able to alias it as ncurses as you have done up till now.

[gauteh]

By the way; if we take on maintaining the gem we could use some help on it if you are interested.

[avtobiff]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 5:35 PM, Gaute Hope [email protected] wrote:

By the way; if we take on maintaining the gem we could use some help on it if you are interested.

Sure thing!

[gauteh]

Ok, so task list before we can do that is something like:

• re-brand to ncursesw
• push to rubygems
• keep ncursesw-sup along for a while yet, sup 0.13 and 0.14 lines as well as 0.15.0 depend on it and some are still on them

we should do this before #12 is merged.

We can keep to the version scheme that we've used for now: Version number from berlios release, increment next digit. We can go back to 1.3.0.* (1.3.1 didn't quite follow this system) since we are using a new name.

Do you agree?

I'll add you to this repository and as an owner of the gem.

[gauteh]

I need your email associated with your rubygems account to add you as an owner, you can send it to me by email if you prefer that.

[avtobiff]

Ok, so task list before we can do that is something like:

• re-brand to ncursesw
• push to rubygems

This can be done almost right away, right?

• keep ncursesw-sup along for a while yet, sup 0.13 and 0.14 lines depend on it and some are still on them

It's basically ncursesw-sup.gemspec that needs to be kept on a branch, no?

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Gaute Hope [email protected] wrote:

I need your email associated with your rubygems account to add you as an owner, you can send it to me by email if you prefer that.

It is listed in sup contributors.

[gauteh]

We don't need to keep a ncursesw-sup branch, we tag it, but ncursesw will replace it. We move it and update it.

[gauteh]

Let's do the change, but let the rest of the maintainers review it (if they have time) before we make the changes to rubygems.

[gauteh]

Or actually, we can make a branch for ncursesw-sup just for historical reference.

[gauteh]

I did the branching+tagging, and you're added to the gem, we should also update email and authors in the gemspec to point to [email protected] and sup developers or something (keep original author as well of course). So that we'll get any communication going to it.

[avtobiff]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 9:10 PM, Gaute Hope [email protected] wrote:

I did the branching+tagging, and you're added to the gem, we should also update email and authors in the gemspec to point to [email protected] and sup developers or something (keep original author as well of course). So that we'll get any communication going to it.

Cool!

[gauteh]

By the way; please use a pull request (or more) for the changes 😀

[gauteh]

Merged.