From: Devin Mullins <twifkak@...>
Date: 2005-10-03T02:24:26+09:00
Subject: Re: why can't Ruby load .gem files directly?

Okay. Well, those are reasonable. :)

Devin

Eivind Eklund wrote:

>(Note that some of these are projections from problems I know about it
>in the context of FreeBSD, which I'm a developer for, and RPA, which
>I've been an advisor for.  I'm just projecting to Debian, based on
>having read various Debian policy documents and talked to Debian users
>and developers.)
>
>There is several reasons, including the deinstall problem that was
>mentioned, that Gems start writing places they shouldn't (so write
>protection of some areas of the disk don't work), and that Debian
>generally do maintenance on single versions, fixing security holes as
>they pop up etc so you can install a package, then run apt-get update
>and get everything updated.  This cascades to the rest of the package
>organization.
>
>Also, people expect to be able to find documentation etc in the
>"normal places" even for langauges they're not used to, and
>applications sometimes depend on executables.
>
>There's a whole host of complexities that come up here when you
>actually do packaging and maintenance.
>
>Eivind.
>  
>