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It sounds like a debian user problem, not a Ruby user problem. I think most
Ruby people (who probably are not running ruby on Debian) want Ruby to work
like...Ruby, whether it's on a Mac, Windows, RedHat, Debian, Slolaris,
whatever. Has a similar beef been made about Java on Debian? (Why must Java
apps be deployed as .jar, .ear, war, whatever. Can't they pick just one and
make it work with apt-get?).


On 10/2/05, Eivind Eklund <eeklund / gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/2/05, Devin Mullins <twifkak / comcast.net> wrote:
> > Joshua Haberman wrote:
> >
> > > Say that you had two implementations of gems with identical feature
> > > sets, but one used the "gem" command to do everything and one let you
> > > use .gem files directly. I would *much* prefer using the latter.
> >
> > Actually, it doesn't sound like they're mutually exclusive. Stick a
> > little flag in the metadata.gz that says "I don't have a compile step!"
> > and then it can be stuck on the $LOAD_PATH directly. Otherwise, upon
> > require-ing something from inside the gem, you'll get an error "Install
> > meeee!!"
> >
> > > Yes, I don't know the details of the current controversy (ie. why
> > > Debian is having a problem packaging gems)
> >
> > Neither do I. Are they trying to repackage gems as... err.. whatever the
> > apt-get file extension is? If so, why?
>
> They're trying to repackage software that the author assume to be
> Gem-distributed as Debian packages (.deb, IIRC). The reason for this
> is simple: To provide Ruby software on Debian for Debian users in the
> way Debian users are used to. These users do not particularly care
> about Ruby, and definately do not want to have to know one packaging
> system for handling Ruby software, and another for handling Perl, and
> another for handling Java, and another for handling Haskell, and
> another for handling Python, and another way for handling C code, and
> ...
>
> Instead, they want they software to Just Work Like All Other Software,
> the way they are used to, and to not have to care about the language
> the software is written in at all.
>
> The problem is when Gems provide guarantees to the authors that are in
> violation of how Debian users are used to software working, and no way
> to implement things the authors need in a way that is possible to use
> with the way Debian users want. Specifically, there's a problem with
> the the-software-is-in-a-single-directory assumption.
>
> Eivind.
> --
> Hazzle free packages for Ruby?
> RPA is available from http://www.rubyarchive.org/
>
>

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