On Sat, Dec 24, 2005 at 07:39:46AM +0900, Shot - Piotr Szotkowski wrote:
} Hello.
} 
} mathew:
} 
} > Yes, well, let's not reopen the RubyGems vs APT discussion again...
} > That's one area where the Debian folk deserve criticism, but they
} > don't seem to have any interest in cooperating to fix the problem.
} 
} Don't you think that following 'let's not reopen' with 'Debian folk
} deserve criticism' and 'don't seem to have any interest in cooperating'
} seems a bit contradictory?
} 
} Al Gordon:
} 
} > Is there an easy way for Debian users to create .debs for stuff
} > otherwise installed via gems or with setup.rb?  I regularly create
} > .debs for "./configure; make; make install" by using checkinstall,
} > but am unaware of the ruby equivalent, if any.
} 
} Don't `checkinstall gem install ...`
} and `checkinstall ruby setup.rb` work?
} 
} (Not tried these, just wondering.)

I haven't tried either of these, but I've been happy with a /usr/local
install of gem on Debian. It took some work to figure out how to get it to
work right, but I documented it at
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1198&group_id=126&atid=575
so other people can deal with it themselves. To deal with the GEM_HOME
environment variable issue I added the following line to /etc/csh.cshrc:

setenv GEM_HOME "/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/gems"

...and the following line to /etc/profile:

export GEM_HOME="/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/gems"

I also symlinked /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/gems/bin to /usr/local/bin for
convenience.

While it would be nice if Debian magically played nice with RubyGems, I'm
more annoyed that it took a moderately complicated workaround to get gem to
install in /usr/local properly, like any well-behaved piece of OSS would.

} Cheers,
} -- Shot (who believes that Debian folks are right in trying to follow FHS)
--Greg