rubygems

[Rocco Stanzione]

I know it's late in the release cycle to bring this up, so let me say I'm 
wanting to address the policy, rather than just this specific issue...

We don't package rubygems, presumably because using it will install software 
outside the package management system.  We also don't package many of the 
gems a user might want to install, which we do with CPAN.  The most common 
reason to install Ruby is presently for Rails, which we do package, with the 
required gems (for a base Rails install) bundled with it.  I for one write a 
lot of non-Rails Ruby code that uses gems, for which this setup doesn't work 
very well, so I manually install rubygems on all my machines, and use it to 
install my gems.

If my assumption about why we don't package rubygems is correct, I hope 
there's room for discussion on the policy.  If there's not, I would like to 
see gems packaged the way CPAN modules are packaged.  Rails would be packaged 
as a gem, and it would depend on activerecord, activesupport, etc. just as 
the gem does.  I look forward to hearing any thoughts on this.

Thanks,

Rocco Stanzione