On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:12 AM, Robert Klemme
<shortcutter / googlemail.com> wrote:
> 2008/9/28 Trans <transfire / gmail.com>:
>> On Sep 25, 1:39 pm, "Berger, Daniel" <Daniel.Ber... / qwest.com> wrote:
>>> Then there's the other option of removing everything from the standard
>>> library completely except rubygems, and letting folks install only what
>>> they want. But, maybe that's another topic. :)
>> Probably not quite everything should go. But, given that RubyGems is
>> now standard, and used by everyone, I'd say that sounds like a damn
>> good idea.
> I do not think this is a good idea because especially in corporate
> environments chances are that you either are not allowed or cannot
> install additional software. This is an administrator's nightmare.
> Plus, you cannot make sure that two installations are identical
> version wise.  We do already today have discussions like "it works on
> 1.8.6 but not on 1.8.4" and the like - we would additionally see "it
> works on my 1.8.7 but not on my colleague's 1.8.7". I don't think this
> change is worth the effort.

I recently had something stop working because a binary gem provided
with the one-click installer (ParseTree 2.1.1) was being overridden by
an incomplete installation of ParseTree 2.2. It was extremely
frustrating, since I hadn't asked for ParseTree 2.2 at all (it was
installed automatically when installing something else).

No, there is definitely value in having a wide subset of functionality
in the Ruby standard library. I don't always agree with what's there
(namely, what's missing vs. what's present, and the way or the why
certain libraries were chosen), but Ruby doesn't benefit from taking a
Linux distribution approach.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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