Eivind Eklund said:
> First of all, the comparison with a raw tar file is inappropriate.
> Packagers basically never work with really raw tar files - we work
> with tar files that include some installer system, be that a
> "setup.rb" file [...]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean a tar file you just untar directly into the ruby
directories.  I meant a tar file like the one Rake is distributed in
(that's why I used it as an example).  The tar file contains a install
script[1] for non-gem installs.  The gem file contains the exact same
thing.

Gems uses the same defaults as the standard setup.rb install script uses. 
Setting up for setup.rb makes it easy to setup for gems as well.  Using
the rake gem packaging tools makes it trivial to distribute both gems and
tgz file with identical contents.

> In RubyGems guarantee the Gem author that the Gem will be installed with
> all the directories placed in a particular fashion compared to each other,
> including extra data space.

Actually, RubyGems is entirely silent on the matter of data storage.  Thus
the problem of individual authors doing the relative file path thing.

If RubyGems provided a option to copy files in to a area designed by
Config::CONFIG['datadir'], would that be adequate?

-- 
-- Jim Weirich     jim / weirichhouse.org    http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)

[1] I should convert to use setup.rb.