On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 18:26, Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Simon Cozens" <simon / simon-cozens.org>
> Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
> To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk / ruby-lang.org>
> Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 5:05 PM
> Subject: Re: Ruby advantages over Perl
> 
> 
> > Jason Creighton <androflux / remove.to.reply.softhome.net> writes:
> > > ....or whatever. We need more flexible package managers in general, not
> just
> > > a language specific package manager every time we feel like we need to
> > > reinvent the wheel.
> >
> > The problem with solving the general case once and for all is that
> everyone
> > talks about it and nobody does it. CPAN may have its flaws, but it beats
> > anything non-existent hands down.
> 
> Ah, the ontological proof of the existence of CPAN.
> 
> Actually I've always thought it worth noting that
> CPAN wasn't built in a day (to coin a phrase).
> Whatever benefits it has, it wasn't created with
> all of them at once.
> 
> Likewise, RAA is much better than it was a year ago.
> (Thanks to the hard work of certain developers.)
> 
> To me, the important thing is continuous improvement.
> Sure, catch the vision of what RAA should be like in
> five years. But don't stop worrying about what it
> will be in six months.
> 
> The thing about dreams is that their implementation
> is so daunting. That's one reason XP (arguably) is
> better than Big Design Up Front. When we dream, we
> sometimes forget YAGNI and want to do everything at
> once.

What is YAGNI?

> 
> I think this is why RubyGems went away (not to
> disparage the author, who did a great job). It was
> more dream than reality (though it was a *good*
> dream). raa-install is not as good as the dream of
> RubyGems; but raa-install is here now, and it works.
> 
> And as Simon said so aptly, it beats anything non-
> existent hands down.
> 
> Hal
> 
>