From: Eivind Eklund <eeklund@...>
Date: 2004-10-04T23:54:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8.2

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 22:34:53 +0900, George  Moschovitis
<george.moschovitis@gmail.com> wrote:
> No I just think, that some of the ruby/extensions should be part of the
> main distribution. RubyGems are easy, but having such nice methods
> automatically installed is even better :)

I'm with FreeBSD.  Just as background:

We've had occasionally had fairly bad experiences with pulling
externally maintained software into a base system.  The problem is
that this trigger a conflict between updating and stability, and has
led to very outdated versions being in the base (e.g, perl4 stuck
around for many years after its due date; at the moment, we have perl
5.6.1 in the base system for our 4.x branch, even though the current
version is 5.8.4 - and 5.8 has been the relevant version for about two
years.)

I'm not sure what forces are involved for Ruby just here, but just
wanted to warn that "pull it into the base system to make it available
everywhere" comes with non-obvious drawbacks.  The includsion of Perl
in the FreeBSD base system created a ton of problems for people using
perl on FreeBSD, for instance.

Eivind.