From: Jim Weirich Date: 2004-12-09T07:33:47+09:00 Subject: Re: [ANN] RubyGems 0.8.3 Released! Nicholas Van Weerdenburg said: > Thanks for the update and the awesome package. RubyGems has made me > far more inclined to try to new libraries in Ruby. And it saves me > hours each month- especially considering I work on serveral machines. > > $ gem install rubygems-update (again, might need to be admin/root) > $ update_rubygems (... here too) > > This is great, but I sometimes forget the command to run. > > Is it possible to output a short doc after install for gems that > require an additional step? This whole post install thing is a bit of a hot topic (sheesh, what isn't these days). It would certainly be useful to run some gem-specific post install instructions. The issue is that install often has to run as admin/root. You might (just maybe) trust rubygems code to run during the install, but running arbitrary code specified in a gem is a bit more risky. Post install scripts would be a perfect place for a hacker to do nasty things. On the other hand, I bet most people grab a tarball and type make install as root and never double check the Makefile for potential problems. I'm not saying that rubygems won't do this in the future, merely that the problem is deep enough and critical enough to spend some time thinking thru the alternatives and make sure we understand issues. Displaying a message isn't nearly the risk of running commands, but I think I would like some clear idea on direction on the above issuse before continuing. > Also, one other question- > Is there a best-practice regarding installing gem rdoc into the system > rdoc? Is there an automatic way to do it? I quite like doing "ri > blahbla" from the command line. Gaaa ... you're asking the guy who regularly screws up his own ri installation. Seriously, this is something that has been discussed, but not explored yet. -- -- Jim Weirich jim@weirichhouse.org http://onestepback.org ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)