On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 01:47:28 +0900, Justin Rudd
<the_pinestraw_man / yahoo.com> wrote:
> But one thing that I do not understand is what is the
> difference between GEMs and RPAs?  Most everything I
> get right now is through GEMs.  Does RPA have any
> advantages?  Should I be using both?

I'll answer basically the same as the last time this question came up:

RubyGems attempts to make it possible for authors to package their
software, giving a standard package environment.  You can get more
information on RubyGems from
http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl

RPA attempts to provide production quality packages for Ruby, working
towards quality, availability and maintenance guarantees for at least
the "core" package sets we provide.  See
http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.cgi?RpaManifesto for our
manifesto.

The reason that RPA and RubyGems use different technology is that I
see providing a quality library of software with minimal author
interaction as enough of a challenge in itself, and wanted to avoid
the extra risk of having to have a long deployment cycle and
interfering requirements for the packaging software.  By controlling
the entire toolchain and package set ourselves, we can optimize their
interaction to make the maintenance task as easy as possible.

The RubyGems and RPA authors cooperate, there is some code overlap,
and we hope to increase that overlap with time.

Eivind.
-- 
Hazzle free packages for Ruby?
RPA is available from http://www.rubyarchive.org/