On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 12:16:06 +0900, leon breedt wrote:

> On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 11:53:11 +0900, Trevor Wennblom <wenn0029 / tc.umn.edu>
> wrote:
>> And just *what* excuse do the Debian maintainers give for this
>> inexcusable mess that they've made of Ruby? With perhaps the exception
>> of ruby1.8-examples, ruby1.8-elisp, and *maybe* ruby1.8-dev and
>> libruby1.8-dbg (I don't know what's in those), the rest off this stuff
>> is part of Ruby's core as defined by Matz. If 'ri' isn't installed (not
>> necessarily the data files, because ri represents program capabilities,
>> too), then any system without it doesn't actually have Ruby.
> -dev and -dbg packages make sense to be split out (headers, and debug
> symbols if you want gdb backtraces), but i don't see the core distribution
> of Python or Perl being broken up into so many bits, so i have no idea why
> they've done it.

It does make sense, for example when the user wants a package that
is written in Ruby, but doesn't want to program in Ruby itself.  In
this case having all the ri-documentation would just fill-up space.

> 
> i.e. core Python package on Debian contains pretty much every module
> (readline, zlib, syslog, and so forth) shipping with the standard Python
> distribution.

Yes, and that's why I have my harddisk cluttered with Python-stuff
that I probably will never use :/

> 
> leon

Kristof