Add rake task to build release packages that bundle traveling ruby

[JoelQ]

Distributing command-line applications as Ruby gems is cumbersome. It requires users to reinstall the application every time they upgrade their Ruby version and it breaks on machines that run older versions of Ruby. It also makes installation more painful for non-Ruby devs.

A better approach is to use a package manager such as Homebrew. This PR creates a set of rake tasks to generate packages that can be tied to a release. It also bundles traveling ruby so as not to depend on the existing rubies on a user's system.

The packages contain shims for Parity's binaries which just run them using traveling ruby. The generated packages have the following structure:

parity-0.4.1-osx
├── bin # shims
│   ├── development
│   ├── production
│   └── staging
└── lib
    ├── app # parity app
    │   ├── README.md
    │   ├── bin
    │   └── lib
    └── ruby # traveling ruby

Packages can be generated with rubies for the following targets:

• OSX rake package:osx
• Linux x86 rake package:linux:x86
• Linux x86_64 rake package:linux:x86_64

or for all packages rake package:all

These packages would then be attached to a release on github. They could be manually downloaded and extracted to a directory with /bin was in PATH or they could be installed via a package manager.

I created a working Homebrew formula that pulls this release on my fork as a proof of concept.

[JoelQ]

@croaky Any thoughts on this change?

[croaky]

This looks like a great idea but I haven't had a chance to review it
closely yet or try it out. I hope to on Friday.

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 8:34 AM, Joël Quenneville [email protected]
wrote:

@croaky https://github.com/croaky Any thoughts on this change?

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#19 (comment).

[croaky]

Awesome work, @JoelQ. Merged as 7916985. Sorry for the delay getting this in. Adding you and @geoffharcourt as committers in case you want to make other updates in the future.

[croaky]

@JoelQ Do you think there's a way to automatically create the Linux versions using Travis?

[geoffharcourt]

Nice!

[JoelQ]

@croaky You mean to test OS-specific builds on Travis?

[croaky]

@JoelQ I mean to generate the tarball. Right now, the 0.5.0 release only has the OS X version but would be nice to offer the Linux version. Could ask a coworker like @jferris or someone to generate it but would be cool to automate it somehow. I was thinking maybe CI for that, or Docker?

[JoelQ]

Ah, I see. The tarball doesn't have to be generated on the target system. That's the whole point of using traveling-ruby. You should be able to generate all the tarballs on you local machine and upload them to the github release page.

[croaky]

Ah, I see. The tarball doesn't have to be generated on the target system. That's the whole point of using traveling-ruby. You should be able to generate all the tarballs on you local machine and upload them to the github release page.

Whooaaa. Mind asplode.

[croaky]

Also adding @gabebw as a collaborator.