From: Brent Roman <brent@...>
Date: 2007-10-15T13:40:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Import gem to Ruby 1.9

I agree with Eric's comment below:

> Yes.  Not everybody will need RubyGems.  For example many Rails  
> installations run with everything unpacked into a local directory for  
> easy deployment.
>
> I would prefer users use RUBYOPT instead of enabling RubyGems by  
> default.
>

Our  embedded Ruby application runs on an ARM processor
with 32MB of DRAM and a compact flash disk (draws about 2W!). 
Linux leaves about 26MB for user processes. 

Gem is is very cool, but it is not for everyone.

As Eric points out, even when resources are available,
self-contained applications may have other ways of package management.

Please, let's not wire any particular package management policy into the
core of Ruby.

-- 
 Brent Roman
 mailto:brent@mbari.org  http://www.mbari.org/~brent