ruby-core

On Friday 30 September 2005 10:02, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> Hmm. I don't care about Debian in the sense that I do not believe that
> Ruby or its packaging system should *cater* to Debian and forget the
> rest of these platforms. There have been statements from some of the
> Debian packagers which have been, IMO, "cater to me or else." I have to

I'll buy this. 'd be inclined to spite them if they were threatening me. 
However, there *is* a pretty big "or else" here. ebian is a pretty 
significant distribution.

> worry about a lot of platforms with a lot of different -- and
> incompatible -- packaging systems. For our commercial product, we've
> punted. We *don't* package natively; we have a .tar.gz with an install
> script that's pretty good about figuring out what it needs to do.

My main concern is that if this is a problem for Debian then there's a pretty 
good chance that there's a fundamental flaw in the Gems architecture.

However, I'll stop talking about Debian, because I don't know what their 
problems are with Gems.  sort of got sucked into empathizing with them 
because I have had my own problems with Gems.

> See, I don't buy the ultimate premise (that RubyGems *breaks* native
> library management). Never have. I will agree that it's a conceptual
> mismatch and that there are things that can be done to minimize that
> conceptual mismatch, but that doesn't change that it doesn't actively
> *break* things.

You may be right.  suspect that Gems won't break anything if:

1) You can download a Gem file as a coherent package and install it without 
access to the network; IE, from a CDROM. his caveat covers a lot issues.

2) You can determine, externally, what the dependencies of the Gem are, 
because RubyGems won't be able to resolve those dependencies -- the native 
package manager must.

3) RubyGems can be used to install a Gem into a particular filespace, and then 
the files in that space can be moved to their real final resting place, all 
without breaking the Gem.

> > Does it matter, if it means that I can't install libraries with Gem
> > *but* I can still install packages with Gentoo's emerge? Both work
...
> Hmm. You *can* install gems locally. That said, my question was more
> pragmatic, and has been answered otherwise -- the CVS HEAD version of
> RubyGems has an experimental authenticating proxy patch.

Ah. o, I must confess ignorance here.  haven't tried to use Ruby to get 
out through a firewall yet.

> > This may be true. RubyGems may have an elegant versioning mechanism.
> > Is it not possible to refactor it out of RubyGems and make it a
> > stand-alone package upon which RubyGems requires?
>
> I do not believe so, as RubyGems solution to this is a side-effect of
> the packaging concept (1-gem-1-dir, which I've suggested to be expanded
> to 1-gem-1-dir-pattern applied against multiple prefixes). It is like
> stow without the sitelib installation. I do not believe that anything
> that tries to depend on stuff that may be installed in site_ruby will
> work.

This looks like a fairly significant problem to me. ou appear to be implying 
that everything that a Gem depends on must be installed as a Gem. m I 
misunderstanding you?

> How would you solve the versioned libraries problem in Ruby, then?

As a separate package, probably as a core change to Ruby itself, and probably 
a change to setup.rb.

I don't think that RubyGems should have anything to do with versioning, per 
se. t should have access to the mechanisms that handle package versioning, 
but shouldn't be tightly coupled.

It would be nice if I could use setup.rb to install a version of something and 
still have access to versioning. 've solved this problem before with my own 
version of "require", but not to my own satisfaction, and I didn't spend too 
much time on it. y solution may be fixable, but I'm hoping that another 
solution will present itself before I have to take on management of yet 
another project :-)

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