On Monday 29 June 2009 12:11:38 pm Fabian Streitel wrote:
> Probably the best thing about it (and probably a major selling point in
> your case)
> is that Arch is rolling release, meaning there's no big releases where you
> have to
> painfully upgrade to the newer big version, and maybe even reinstalling the
> whole
> system (as you have to with e.g. Ubuntu and consorts). They just upgrade
> the packages, and if you run pacman frequently, there are almost no
> compatibility problems.

To me, this is a major selling point of Ubuntu -- if I run apt-get frequently, 
I won't have security issues, but if a new release breaks something, I can go 
back to a previous one until the issue is resolved, and I can put off that big 
upgrade until I want to deal with that hassle.

With a system like Arch -- which I last experienced with Gentoo -- any upgrade 
could potentially break things, which means I have to deal with problems as 
they arise, or I have to not update a lot -- which means more security 
problems.

> ATM it hosts ruby 1.8.7 2009-06-08 patchlevel 173 -- reasonably
> current I'd say.

1.8.7 is actually not a great release. It breaks things that worked in 1.8.6, 
and most people either stay on 1.8.6 or upgrade straight to 1.9.1.

Full disclosure: I use Ubuntu, and it had Ruby 1.8.7. It also doesn't keep 
Ruby 1.9 as up-to-date as I'd like, so I compile that from source.

> > [...] I know that I can just compile from source,
> > but I'd rather spend my time writing Ruby instead of managing
> > packages.

Keep in mind, I install all needed non-Ruby libraries through the OS package 
manager, and I install everything else Ruby-related through Rubygems. So the 
only source package I have to watch for is Ruby 1.9, and that's really a 
matter of watching ruby-talk for release announcements, then running 'svn 
switch' and a couple of make commands.

> And Ruby itself as well als RubyGems come as binary packages, meaning you
> don't have
> to compile them at all.

Rubygems compiles any C extensions on install. Or are you saying Arch packages 
ALL rubygems?