The Owner Problem

Managing owners for gems sucks right now. Let’s fix it. One important note to remember here: the solution should be extensible for subdomains as well.

Related ML posts:
Managing gem owners
Manage owners on the site?

How it works now:

Just a simple has_many through system:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :ownerships
  has_many :rubygems, :through => :ownerships
end

class Ownership < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :rubygem
end

class Rubygem < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :owners, :through => :ownerships, :source => :user
  has_many :ownerships
end

Ways of fixing it

Group model

Create a Group model that has_many Users. Essentially acts as an ACL. Possibly promote one user as a “Manager” or “Admin” of the list. Users can then create arbitrary groups for each Rubygem or Subdomain.

Discussion

Feel free to add your thoughts/idea here (or above) —@qrush

I know you said that the current setup sucks, are there some concrete reasons why? — @jbarnette

Why not just delegate user and owner management to Github? Simply use Github login and request oauth scope to read all the organizations a user belongs to, then provide a select box to let the user choose whichever Github organization a gem belongs to.

As an added bonus, if the gemspec has a link to its GitHub repo, set the gem owner to the Github repo owner automatically by default as long as the user is a member of the owner organization. 100% zero config groups.

— @goofrider 2014.06.30