sass-convert on Fedora

sass (and its successor scss)is a really nice CSS meta-language, enabling nicer hierarchies of classes to be built (much more maintainable).  The transformation software is written in ruby, and provided by the ruby gem haml.

The first step when using SCSS file, is usually to recast existing CSS files into semantically equivalent SCSS files (when you're using someone elses template, for instance).  For this 'magic' there is a tool provided by the haml gem called sass-convert.

But for some reason, when installing the ruby gem haml (using yum install ruby-haml) on Fedora, the sass-convert executable isn't installed.

Here are the steps (this is short and sweet), execute as root :

yum install ruby ruby-devel rubygem-haml
gem install haml rb-inotify

Then you can 'magically' :

sass-convert site.css site.scss

It can help to play around with the order of some of the original css rules, so that the hierarchical aggregation of rules gets more of a clue about what's going on.

Note that above, we also installed rb-inotify, which allows sass to monitor writes to .scss source files and dynamically update the corresponding css (which is a time saver when iteratively developing CSS) :

sass --watch site.scss:site.css