From: Eric Hodel Date: 2007-11-21T05:14:37+09:00 Subject: Re: RubyGems 0.9.5 On Nov 20, 2007, at 06:29 , Michael Greenly wrote: > Rick Denatale wrote: >> On Nov 20, 2007 12:53 AM, Michael Greenly wrote: >>> RubyGems has really become the one thing about Ruby I dislike. >>> >> >> My way of looking a this is the brain-dead packaging of Ruby on >> debian >> is the one thing about Ubuntu (and Debian based distros) that *I* >> dislike. >> >> The problems you've experienced, I think, come from trying to mix >> debian packaged ruby with source installed gems. >> >> When I first started using Ruby on Ubuntu I ran into problems like >> this. At Andy Hunt's suggestion I installed both Ruby and rubygems >> from source and haven't looked back. > > Hardly... in all package managed systems /usr/lib belongs to the > package > manager. No other application should ever be mucking around in there. > This is not something unique to Debian based systems. It's just that > Debian users tend to be more more vocal about these policies. Maybe for Linux distributions. RubyGems works on more than just Linux. > On the other hand if the upstream RubyGems would actually allow for > the > concept that it may live in /usr/lib but not be allowed to manipulate > anything there it would make life a lot easier. RubyGems allows this via the GEM_PATH and GEM_HOME environment variables. It is not the fault of RubyGems if Debian, instead of using the provided features, partially disables them with hard-coded paths to get what they want. -- Poor workers blame their tools. Good workers build better tools. The best workers get their tools to do the work for them. -- Syndicate Wars