From: Eric Schwartz Date: 2005-01-26T06:36:00+09:00 Subject: Re: [Rails] Installation trouble Austin Ziegler writes: > Wrong. This is not -- and never will be -- a RubyGems bug. This is > -- and always will be -- a Debian bug. DRB, YAML, and Zlib are part > of the Ruby platform. If they're not there because of packaging > policies, then it isn't an application bug. It doesn't matter. If the application needs a library, and cannot find it, the application should report that library missing. The application should NOT report some random library that has nothing to do with the actual missing library as missing. If you want to declare all of what comes in ruby-1.8.tar.gz as "standard", that's fine. If you want to claim it's a bug that it's not all there on a default Debian install, that's fine too-- file a bug. But it is never correct for any application to report a bug in class A, when in fact it's in class B. This is basic human factors-- an error message should tell the user: *) What's wrong. *) What the user did to cause this (if applicable) *) What the user can do to fix it. RubyGems, in this particular instance, fails all three criteria. Should Debian install everything in ruby-1.8.2.tar.gz? Maybe. Probably, even. But it is never correct in any context to report errors incorrectly. At worst, a message to the effect of, error loading rubygems/builder.rb: required dependencies are missing (check your installation of ruby?) would be appropriate. After all, it's quite possible the user simply had an error when installing ruby by hand, and somehow the relvant files didn't get copied, or were copied, and read permissions were not set (which can easily happen when isntalling as root with an overly restrictive umask). -=Eric -- Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare. -- Blair Houghton.