From: why the lucky stiff <ruby-core@...>
Date: 2005-09-22T01:50:10+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyGems in Ruby HEAD

Paul van Tilburg wrote:

> Indeed. Note that this is partly due to a different point of view. For 
> Debian we package the libs and apps ourselves. I hate to say it but 
> there is almost no need for RubyGems in our case, whereas it is very 
> handy and good for platforms lacking such packaging and Q&A (win32, 
> OSX, ...). I certainly see the point and usefulness of the system.

To argue that you don't need RubyGems is moot.  I don't use SOAP4R or 
XMLRPC4R, yet they're both in the Ruby dist.  I'm okay with that.  
SOAP4R serves someone else.  And it's the prerogative of Matz to include 
libs like SOAP4R.  I'm not going to argue over the 40k that these 
libraries take up, because that just leads to unproductive quibbling.

Some people may say, "Oh, wow Ruby has builtin SOAP and XML-RPC 
support," and it may sway them toward installing Ruby.  See, that's what 
we want!

_why