From: Ryan Leavengood <mrcode@...>
Date: 2005-07-06T03:24:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby under Cygwin problems

karlin.fox@gmail.com said:
>
> I agree whole-heartedly that this is a silly hack.  In introducing
> others to Ruby I've had them complain about how unclear the -r ubygems
> thing is.  One of my coworkers swore he would never use rubygems
> because of this, I had a hard time convincing him otherwise.  Cygwin
> ruby and the one-click installer should work better together, and
> RUBYOPT and ubygems are the first problems to solve towards this goal,
> IMHO.  I think ubygems critically violates the least-surprise principle!

I personally haven't noticed any problems with this "hack" as you guys
like to call it, and having seen the issues involved with something like
RubyGems (in doing the original prototype) I think it is the best
solution.

I'd really like to hear alternatives. Keep in mind I'm not a developer on
the current RubyGems, so it's not like I'm defending any work of my own.
But I know the RubyGems developers have put a lot of hard work into it,
and to complain as you have without any suggestions for alternatives isn't
particularly constructive.

The issue is that to use libraries that are packaged as gems, you must
require 'rubygems' first. To do this as a gem user in all your scripts is
a bit of a pain, and should you want to distribute your scripts you run
into issues of people possibly not having RubyGems installed. So then
maybe you change that line to "require 'rubygems' rescue nil", which I
think is a bit worse of a hack than the RUBYOPT "hack."

Maybe a nice option would be for the One-Click Installer to prompt on
whether the user wants RUBYOPT set up with "rubygems" or not, with an
explanation of what it is for, and what it means (including what ubygems
is.) That should be the best of both worlds, eh?

Ryan