From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2007-11-21T14:31:29+09:00 Subject: Re: RubyGems 0.9.5 On 11/20/07, Michael Greenly wrote: > > I'd just never use an Ubuntu package for Ruby or RubyGems. Ever. (Why? > > The upstream maintainers at Debian Don't Get Ruby. While the situation > > is better than it has been, it's still a freaking nightmare.) > That actually made me laugh. Debian doesn't get package managment? > It's really quite the opposite. RubyGems started with a very poor > understanding of living in a package managed world. Try responding to what was actually written. I said Debian maintainers Don't Get Ruby. And, to be honest, I question whether they *do* get package management sometimes. It works well, most of the time, but they're completely wrong on a number of factors -- mostly because in a C/C++ binary world, you *have* to do some things certain ways. They're guilty of a lack of imagination. > In theory it currently has the necessary tools. If --prefix installs > and $GEM_HOME were properly respected there wouldn't be a problem, but > there not! Yes, they are. > If they were my stupid 'update --system' mistake wouldn't have moved > ruby gems library from /usr to /usr/local and the gem_home from > /var/lib/rubygems to /usr/lib/ruby/gems. Wrong. RubyGems can't predict when some dumbass maintainer is going to make an idiotic hardcoded changes. It's certainly **never** going to be accepted upstream that way. Your "update --system" problem goes right back to the maintainers, not RubyGems. At all. > RubyGems needs to work correctly no matter where Ruby is installed. It > needs to never modify files outside of --prefix (or installed defined > directories) and it needs to consistently respect $GEM_HOME. Right. But you have to get it to know about those places -- and it *does* consistently respect $GEM_HOME. Just because your maintainer was stupid enough to MODIFY THE SOURCE rather than using, you know, ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES doesn't make it RubyGems fault. Your breakage was because through update --system you ended up putting a non-bastardized version of RubyGems on your system (and it's not going to bastardize itself for your broken packages) and moving things around from the broken places that the dumbass maintainer placed them. There's a right way and there's a wrong way. Debian -- and therefore Ubuntu -- chose the wrong way. Apple, on the other hand, chose the right way (*including* telling people how to update preinstalled gems and RubyGems itself). -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * austin@halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * austin@zieglers.ca