Ruby on Rails support in Intrepid - call for reviewers and cheerleaders

[Stephan Hermann]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 02:01:26PM -0700, Mathias Gug wrote:
> What are you referring to by package ?
> 
> The make a parallel with python, the gem command is similar to easy_intall.

And ezinstall is broken by design for a binary distro and for endusers.

ezinstall doesn't check if there is the correct version somehow
installed, but downloads from questionable sources (!) .egg files.
Most likely we (as packagers) are patching this away.

> Neil's proposal is to improve the gem command (from the libgems-ruby
> package) so that binaries are installed in /usr/local/bin (thus they're
> on the default path). If you'd use install gems from the upstream
> source, binaries would be installed in /usr/bin/. The goal is that gems
> installed by the gem command don't interfere with ruby libraries and
> binaries installed by debian packages.

Don't Use Another Package System Then The One From The Distro !

Gem is just another broken package management system for ruby.
Pear is just another broken package management system for php.
ez_install is just another broken design fullfill dependency management
system for python.
I think there are others I forgot to mention.

Gem packages are even more dangerous because they are delivering
sometimes also binaries...which can break your current installation of
the stable distro you use.

Everytime I have developers in my real life work who are trying to
convince me to use this system, I rather try to let them stay in front
of a wall and do the chinese way of getting rid of those devs. 

Mostly I'll go and try to package it in a sane way, the way of my used
distro. It will be more difficult but it helps the user and in this case
mostly the user is the sysadmin.

Developer, who are in need of the newest crack for their development can
use gem or pear or ez-install without being unhappy when they destroy
their system, they are developer, and they should know what they are
doing. (Today this is difficult to say, because most developers don't
have a clue what they are doing anyways, only when they are involved in
distro specific workflows they know about the problems).

I think we don't need another way of handling gem, we just need the time
to package all this broken gem crack..

\sh
-- 
Stephan '\sh' Hermann		| OSS Developer & Systemadministrator
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