From: Nathaniel Talbott <nathaniel@...>
Date: 2004-10-05T00:31:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8.2

On Oct 4, 2004, at 10:54, Eivind Eklund wrote:

> 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 led to very outdated versions being in the base (e.g, perl4 stuck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.

I'll just chime in here quickly and say that test/unit development has 
definitely been slowed by its inclusion in the standard ruby distro. 
Now, I happen to think that a unit testing framework is one of those 
things that should _definitely_ be in the standard distribution, and 
that slowing changes in it might be a good thing, however it is 
something to think long and hard about when wishing a library in to the 
standard.


Nathaniel
Terralien, Inc.

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