From: Hugh Sasse <hgs@...>
Date: 2005-10-06T00:06:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Gems is over engineered

On Wed, 5 Oct 2005, nobu.nokada@softhome.net wrote:

> Hi,
>
> At Sun, 2 Oct 2005 03:14:02 +0900,
> Austin Ziegler wrote in [ruby-talk:158553]:
>> On 10/1/05, Trans <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> There has been a lot of talk on core about Gems and how it
>>> interrelates to various OS (file hierarchy) philosophies. Of
>>> significant issue is the "DATADIR problem".
>>
>> This is a *Ruby* problem that's accentuated by RubyGems, but is not
>> caused by RubyGems. The integration of RubyGems into the Ruby core is an
>> opportunity here to solve this for Ruby.
>
> What do you consider needed for that purpose?

There is a need for Ruby to ease the separation of portable
libraries, architecture-dependent libraries, data files, and
documentation for those platforms which expect this.  In short, we
need ruby's CONFIG hash to specify more places for things to go,
(even if for many platforms they end up pointing at the same place).
This would allow people to specify directories for things which are
shared between machines, and those that are machine specific, areas
which are likely to grow (like /var) and those of constant size, and
those areas which need read/write access and those that only need to
be read.

Quite which combinations will make the most people happy, I cannot
say.
>
> -- 
> Nobu Nakada
>
         HTH
         Hugh