From: Chad Perrin Date: 2007-09-16T07:29:12+09:00 Subject: Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails On Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 05:03:07AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > It's probably *better* with Gentoo than most other distros and it's > probably better with Ruby than some other packages with their own > repositories, but unless the distro (or someone outside) has put a > significant amount of effort into integration, you're right ... if you > want to run a bleeding edge Ruby and gems, you should nuke whatever's on > your distro, if anything, install everything in /usr/local from source > and from the gem repository, and lie to other packages expecting to see > /usr/bin/ruby when they install. One of the things I like about *BSD, actually, is the tendency for anything not in the base system to end up in /usr/local. This, combined with the way everything is ultimately based on source distributions of software and software management is basically built on the fundamental tools that are available everywhere, adds up to a system that's really easy to customize with software compiled from source and added into the system oneself, without screwing up a package management system. Your mileage may vary, but I've had really good luck with Perl and Ruby modules on FreeBSD. > > I went through this with R on CentOS 5. It's a big hassle. R is in good > shape on Debian, but only because there's a developer in the Debian > community that repackages R and the interfaces to contributed packages. > I never did get the fonts working in R, and I gave up on it. > Fortunately, I didn't need to load Ruby or gems on this machine. Or > stick with production stable tested configurations from the distro. Everything should work swimmingly on Debian (most of the time, at least), as long as you only want the version of Ruby currently in the package repositories and don't need gems that aren't packaged for APT. If you want a different version of Ruby or additional gems, however, you're better off installing in /usr/local/bin rather than /usr/bin, as you said. -- CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Patrick J. LoPresti: "Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"