From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2007-11-21T09:32:33+09:00 Subject: Re: RubyGems 0.9.5 Austin Ziegler wrote: > On 11/20/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: >> Michael Greenly wrote: >>> 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. >> Let me emphasize what you just said. /usr/lib belongs to the package >> manager on all distros! There's a *reason* the Ruby source and most >> other upstream sources install to ("--prefix" in "configure") >> */usr/local* rather than */usr* by default. So ... your options are >> >> 1. Work with the packages as supplied by your distro. >> 2. *Don't* install the packages supplied by your distro -- use upstream >> source and put things in /usr/local. >> 3. Complain and whine to busy people who will blow you off. :) > > 4. Complain to your distro manager to be more sensible when it comes > to Ruby. Look closely at what Apple did for good suggestions. > > -austin Apple Computer is a for-profit entity. Unless you're buying SuSE/Novell or RHEL support, I wouldn't count on getting much sympathy from the distro. I see people from Apple and Microsoft and Sun at RubyConf, but I don't see people from Gentoo, Debian or Ubuntu, or even Red Hat. If you were in Charlotte, please speak up and prove me wrong. :) I personally think Gentoo is close to optimal in their interaction with RubyGems, but it gets dicey if you want to use a gem that *isn't* in Portage. I have multiple Ruby versions on my machines and simply tweak the PATH and other environment variable settings to get the one I want.