Adeodato Simwrote:
> * Michael DeHaan [Sunday, December 19, 2004 00:42] {comp.lang.ruby}: 
> 
> 
>>Debian does this with all languages, but it's very good in the long
>>run for doing so.  There is little distinction between the stdlib and
>>other packages, and you upgrade all at will....
> 
> 
> but having an easy way of installing all of those packages would be useful
> for less experienced people. I can easily find out the list of such
> packages, but I realize that may not be the case of other people.
> 
> for that purpose, I just submitted #286400 (http://bugs.debian.org/286400).
> 

Great point.  Virtual ruby package(s) or at least documenting commonly 
installed packages would be nice.

Here's the one-liner shell script I used to install ruby on Debian 
Sarge.  And a commented-out, longer version that is recommended for rails.

#!/bin/sh

### command used to install ruby (1.8.2 2004-12-06)
### enough for installing rubygems from source
### and supports 'gem install activerecord'
apt-get install ruby ruby1.8 ruby1.8-examples libyaml-ruby1.8 
libdbm-ruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 liberb-ruby1.8 libsyslog-ruby1.8 
libtest-unit-ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev libruby1.8 libiconv-ruby1.8 
libzlib-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 irb1.8

### these are all the packages recommended for rails
### commented out in this script, but kept around for reference
#apt-get -s install irb1.8 libbigdecimal-ruby1.8 libcurses-ruby1.8 
libdbm-ruby1.8 libdl-ruby1.8 libdrb-ruby1.8 liberb-ruby1.8 
libgdbm-ruby1.8 libiconv-ruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libpty-ruby1.8 
libracc-runtime-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 librexml-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 
libruby1.8-dbg libsdbm-ruby1.8 libsoap-ruby1.8 libstrscan-ruby1.8 
libsyslog-ruby1.8 libtcltk-ruby1.8 libtest-unit-ruby1.8 libtk-ruby1.8 
libwebrick-ruby1.8 libxmlrpc-ruby1.8 libyaml-ruby1.8 libzlib-ruby1.8 
rdoc1.8 ri1.8 ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8-elisp ruby1.8-examples