From: Ryan Leavengood <mrcode@...>
Date: 2005-07-07T01:04:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby under Cygwin problems

Aredridel said:
>
> Heartily, heartily seconded. That way, if someone who works on a linux
> distro like Fedora, PLD or Debian should want to package software that
> uses your library, or to package your library, so that it "Just works"
> for their users, they'll give up. That way nobody accidentally makes it
> easy to install.

I set up Ruby, RubyGems and Rails on my new Gentoo box without any
difficulty. I'm not some Linux expert either.

> Seriously, gems are really hard to package into an RPM. Really, really
> hard. I end up un-packing them as tarballs, then patching them out to
> remove the require_gem lines, require 'rubygems', and then correcting
> the assumptions about the location of data files.

RubyGems are Ruby's package manager. If you want to install a gem, use
RubyGems. Trying to twist and turn and stuff the square peg into the round
hole to turn a gem into an RPM is outside the scope of the design of
RubyGems. If you and a sufficiently large number of other end users feel
that it should be easy to turn gems into RPMs or one of the other Linux
package formats then that should become a new requirement of the system.
But I imagine it would require a lot of work and probably negative
compromises, so there had better be a lot of good reasons to do it beyond
"it allows me to install rails with one command."

> And before you say "... just use gems", let me point out something:
>
> To run, say, Rails, with gems:
>
>   1) manually install ruby
>   2) manually install rubygems
>   3) gem install rails

As others have said, steps 1 and 2 only have to be done once for you to
use any current gem. To use RPMs you need RedHat or SuSE or one of the
other RPM distros, yet you left that out of your second shorter example.

Ryan