On Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:19:29 -0500, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> On 11/21/07, Eivind Eklund <eeklund / gmail.com> wrote:
>> To my mind, the "right" way to deal with this particular issue would
>> probably be to have RubyGems automatically patch itself on update,
>> keeping the old paths around in the new "binary".  Yeah, it's icky.
> 
> It's completely wrong and completely *not* RubyGems responsibility.
> RubyGems shouldn't be patching/diffing. Do you know of *any* program
> that does that?
> 
> This problem isn't RubyGems problem. While I might agree that
> environment variables aren't ideal (they're not), they are the way that
> RubyGems works.
> 
> Don't like it and have a better idea? Provide patches. Patches that
> would make RubyGems work around a patched version of RubyGems, though,
> should be rejected with force.
> 
>> It seems less icky than the alternative, which is an application that
>> needs environment variables to work correctly, and (from a user's
>> perspective, as seen by the initial complaint) mess up in the absence
>> of them
> 
> The problem is that Mr. Greenly did something that shouldn't have been
> allowed. It's not RubyGems responsibility to prevent that; it's the
> Debian maintainers responsibility to disallow it if they're going to
> incompatibly (and stupidly) change a package that they're maintaining.
> 
> -austin

I have filed a bug in Debian regarding this. See http://
bugs.debian.org/452547

--Ken



-- 
Ken (Chanoch) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/