From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2005-01-16T21:48:48+09:00 Subject: Re: Bug#290705: ruby: Ruby is completly vivisected. On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 19:51:19 +0900, Kristof Bastiaensen wrote: > On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 12:16:06 +0900, leon breedt wrote: > > On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 11:53:11 +0900, Trevor Wennblom > > wrote: > >> And just *what* excuse do the Debian maintainers give for this > >> inexcusable mess that they've made of Ruby? With perhaps the exception > >> of ruby1.8-examples, ruby1.8-elisp, and *maybe* ruby1.8-dev and > >> libruby1.8-dbg (I don't know what's in those), the rest off this stuff > >> is part of Ruby's core as defined by Matz. If 'ri' isn't installed (not > >> necessarily the data files, because ri represents program capabilities, > >> too), then any system without it doesn't actually have Ruby. > > -dev and -dbg packages make sense to be split out (headers, and debug > > symbols if you want gdb backtraces), but i don't see the core distribution > > of Python or Perl being broken up into so many bits, so i have no idea why > > they've done it. > 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. Not at all. As I have pointed out in my original message that was kindly copied to the Debian bug list, ri is *more* than just documentation. It is the set of programs and libraries which comprise ri at the command-line and behind the command-line. If I were to write a program that used ri (or rdoc) and someone wanted to use it, it wouldn't work on most folks's Debian installs -- because of the idiotic way that the Debian packages have been split up. The core libraries shouldn't be vivisected this way (that's a great way of saying it, Trevor). If you want to provide the ri documentation separate, okay -- I'll think you're being silly, but don't you *dare* pretend to know how to package the core libraries better than the people who use the lanaguage every day and the people who define the language. As a perfect example, the RubyGems mailing list has gotten at least three reports of being unable to use RubyGems on Debian because libzlib-ruby hasn't been installed because they installed what seemed most sensible (ruby18). Oops. This is simply inexcusable. Not only that, a few megs of disk space is nothing. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca