From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2006-03-31T02:59:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Unintentional hype of Ruby irb and ri

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 stephen.tashiro@us.army.mil wrote:

> Perhaps an inflamatory title - but it answers some simple questions.
>
> Having looked at the Pixaxe book and visited various websites with Ruby
> tutorials, I think there is an unintentional hype of certain Ruby
> features.  We may blame this on the distributors of software.  For
> example, the authors tell us how easy it is to use irb.  On my Redhat
> Enterprise Linux machine, ruby puts("Hello World") ran fine.  But irb
> was not a command known to bash.   The redhat distribution has the
> packages:
> ruby-docs-1.8.1-7.EL4.2
> ruby-tcltk-1.8.1-7.EL4.2
> ruby-1.8.1-7.EL4.2
> ruby-mode-1.8.1-7.EL4.2
> ruby-devel-1.8.1-7.EL4.2
> ruby-libs-1.8.1-7.EL4.2
> irb-1.8.1-7.EL4.2
> So you might get ruby but not irb.
>
> The authors extol the virtues of ri.  I found that ri File  (or ri
> almost anything) gave:
> No ri documentation found in:
>     /usr/share/ri/1.8/system
>     /usr/share/ri/1.8/site
>     /root/.rdoc
>
> These problems can be blamed on incompetent packaging or installation
> of Ruby, but it seems to me that the authors of Ruby tutorials should
> warn their readers about such problems and perhaps give some hints
> about how to resolve them.
>
> In Redhat Enterprise Linux 4, I was able to resolve the irb problem
> simply by installing the irb-1.8.1-7 package.
>
> At to the ri problem,I found no tutorials that mention rdoc or
> configure ri.  Reading the output of
> ri -h
> I concluded it would suffice to run
> rdoc --ri
> which creates a director called "doc" in my home directory.    And this
> makes ri work for the basic ruby objects.  (Of course a more efficient
> way on a mult-user system would be to create this "doc" file in only
> one location and direct the ri for each user to it.  It would be nice
> to have a simple example of this. )

we use rhe on all our machines and i can tell you this:  the rh ruby rpms are
broken, broken, broken, broken - do not use them and please complain to redhat
(i have several times).

all the issues you are seeing are resolved by using almost any installation
method besides rhe rpms.  it even works on fedora.

i manage about 50 machines and we've taken the compile route - however, since
all the boxes see a common nfs mount we install only once there.

rhe rpms are really really bad in general and should be avoided - for example
the image magic packages break (silently) loseless compression of jp2s...  the
perl rpm has a userland kernel panic causing bug, etc, etc.

we use plain vanilla rhe, installing anything 'important' via compilation and
have 100% success with this approach.  it's also immune to the auto-upgrade of
enterprise systems breaking 24x7 systems on a late sunday evening.

the reality is that there is exactly one method of installing ruby, or
anything else for that matter, that will work on any platform:

   ./configure --prefix=dst && make && sudo make install

this becomes __really__ important once one starts installing gems that
auto-compile and then upgrade ruby using rpms - only to have all gems start
giving bus errors...  correct compilation avoids this entirely in addition to
allowing multiple ruby versions to be installed (which we require).

sad.  but true.

regards.

-a
-- 
share your knowledge.  it's a way to achieve immortality.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama