Good day.

I’d like to announce the completion of the gem2arch script to the 1.0 feature set. This script has several interesting features:

• Invoked as “gem2arch sup”, it will generate a PKGBUILD for sup with the dependencies from the gem specfile. It will automatically fetch the gem specfile from the gem server. This PKGBUILD should be nearly immediately usable (but will lack md5sum line). The script will pull in the description and use your name from makepkg.conf if it is set there.
• Invoked as “gem2arch -dq sup”, it will list the dependencies that are given in the sup gem. The purpose of this is to be able to write shell loops along the lines of: gem2arch sup && gem2arch -dq sup | grep -Ev "list|of|dependencies|to|ignore" | while read dependency; do gem2arch ${dependency}; done
• A man page is included with the tarball.

Anyway, you can get the script here: gem2arch-1.0.tar.gz. Alternatively, you can get a git clone: git clone git://git.mercenariesguild.net/gem2arch-garoth.git

In general, the focus of this program was clear code and very simple usefulness. There is another gem2arch script on the web that predates this script, but the code was somewhat unpleasant and the old script required more work to use. This gem2arch’s in no part uses the old gem2arch’s code — it is a fresh rewrite.

I must massively credit David “davekong” Campbell for his work on this gem2arch script. I started working on this script many months ago, but lost interest (as I am apt to do…). Recently, he came along and wrote me many patches that improved the code and fixed up the rough parts. He also very graciously helped me in creating all of the side things that I was lazy with such as man pages and so forth. I also very much appreciate him beating me with a stick and forcing me to drop some of the crazier features that my original script had or planned to have. I can only do him the honour of calling him a co-author, but really, this wouldn’t have been pushed through the finish line without him. What a great guy he is to help a stranger randomly, eh?