Rgsyn

Rgsyn is a client-server application that is capable of converting RubyGems libraries from gem packages to RPM and vice versa.

This web service was created within Tool for RubyGems -- RPM synchronization thesis. For more information see the thesis itself.

Rgsyn-server

The server part of Rgsyn does all the hard work involved during conversion. It provides RESTful API, through which it receives packages that should be converted, as well as other commands and queries user might be interested in.

Rgsyn-server also provides repositories with all the packages that were received or created, along with metadata about the repositories required by the two standard clients - RubyGems client (or simply gem, as known from command line) and Yum - for gem and RPM packages respectively.

DEPENDENCIES:

• Redis - database (yum install redis)
• Mock - RPM building tool (yum install mock)
• Ruby-devel - necessary, in order to build libraries listed in the Gemfile (yum install ruby-devel)

SERVER CONFIGURATION:

Before the server can be deployed, it must be configured. The configuration file is located in config/rgsyn-server.yml. Instructions are included in the file in the form of comments.

SERVER DEPLOYMENT:

• make sure that the user running the Rgsyn server belongs to group 'mock'
• start up Redis server (sudo /etc/init.d/redis start should do the trick)
• start up Rgsyn server using God (god -c rgsyn.god)

DEVELOPMENT:

To make server (re)starting easier and faster, developers can make use of the scratch_start.sh bash script that automates the following steps:

• start Redis database server (if not running yet)
• terminate previous instance of Rgsyn server - kills the server as well as its workers
• clean up logs, public directories and destroy all data in Redis - so that the newly started server will be completely clean
• start Rgsyn server

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:

Due to the fact that building RPM packages is very resource-intensive, Rgsyn server has high hardware requirements -- or in other words, individual conversions may take a long time to finish.

Especially long is usually the first gem to RPM conversion on a clean system, as the used Mock utility needs to download and cache necessary packages.

COMPATIBILITY:

Even though there are other Linux distributions using RPM, Rgsyn was tested only on Fedora.