rubygems

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 02/05/06 at 16:39 -0500, Rocco Stanzione wrote:
> 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.

Not only because of this. Rubygems has quite a lot of issues, described
in http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html , and the
Rubygems developers have been totally unresponsive, so it's probably a
bad idea to encourage the use of Rubygems.

> We also don't package many of the 
> gems a user might want to install

Could you please provide a list of them, so we [MOTURuby or Debian
pkg-ruby-extras team] can package them ?

> , 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.

Really, it's not a good idea, because (for example) gem compiles stuff
at install time, so a librmagick-ruby gem would require a compiler,
libmagick9-dev, etc. However, for Ruby developers knowing what they want
to do, it's true that it would be a good idea to provide a rubygems
package (without using it to install other packages).

There's some work done on a rubygems package by the Debian
pkg-ruby-extras team. Please coordinate with Daigo Moriwaki to make sure
it works properly and can be uploaded to Ubuntu. 
Relevant URLs :
http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-ruby-extras/packages/libgems-ruby/trunk/debian/?rev=0&sc=0
 
Thank you,
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
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