From: leon breedt <bitserf@...>
Date: 2005-01-16T20:02:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Bug#290705: ruby: Ruby is completly vivisected.

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 19:51:19 +0900, Kristof Bastiaensen
<kristof@vleeuwen.org> wrote:
> It does make sense, for example when the user wants a package that
> is written in Ruby, but doesn't want to program in Ruby itself.  In
> this case having all the ri-documentation would just fill-up space.
What if the same user wants to run a Ruby package that requires a core
module to be present? Now they have to walk the dependency tree.
Space-saving vs. convenience. Which is more likely to annoy end-users?

A compromise could be to have a virtual Ruby package that declares the
correct dependencies to have the same modules as would be gotten by
doing a core install from source, at least you could opt out and
delete the virtual package and extraneous modules if you wanted to.
I.e. instead of apt-get'ing tens of packages:

$ apt-get install ruby-core

As I recall, it was mentioned that even this compromise was not deemed
acceptable by the Debian maintainers...although this is complete
hearsay as I heard it on IRC, so, take it with a tonne of salt.

Leon