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I guess it’s hard to top RubyX when it comes to an OS alliance with Ruby. However, FreeBSD’s portupgrade long ago heaved the bar up—it’s a scriptable application for updating ports. I’ve always considered it to be neck-and-neck with tDiary for being Ruby’s first killer app. And portupgrade has got tDiary beat on worldwide adoption. tDiary is hot snakes in Japan—and only.

The primary means of scripting portupgrade is with the pkgtools.conf, which is a Ruby script full of constants. For example, should you want to give make arguments for certain packages, MAKE_ARGS is a hash:

  MAKE_ARGS = {
    'editors/vim' => 'NO_GUI=yes WITH_RUBY=yes',
    'shells/scponly' => 'WITH_SCPONLY_SCP=yes WITH_SCPONLY_GFTP=yes 
       WITH_SCPONLY_WINSCP=yes WITH_SCPONLY_CHROOT=yes',
    'sysutils/gkrellm2' => 'GKRELLM_SERVER_ONLY=yes'
  }

If you know Ruby, scripting portupgrade becomes really trivial. In fact, one of the first Ruby programs I wrote kept the long and winding PHP make flags I had and abstracted them into a simple array.

Like so:

  PHP_OPTS = %w[bz2 ctype imap MySQL overload pcre
    posix session sockets standard tokenizer xml 
    xmlrpc zlib]
  MAKE_ARGS = {
    'lang/php4' => "BATCH=yes WITH_APACHE2=yes " +
        PHP_OPTS.collect { |o| "WITH_#{o.upcase}=yes" }.join( ' ' )
  }

Imagine if you could script your web server in this manner. See and it seems like the budding courtship between lighttpd and Ruby would yield such scripting. (VHosts in a YAML file, anyone??)

The author of portupgrade (and portsdb), knu, has been the Ruby CVS chieftain since 2000. He has been nothing but judicious and kind. And we’ve all benefited from cvsmailer at one time or another, wouldn’t you say??