From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2007-11-22T00:19:29+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyGems 0.9.5

On 11/21/07, Eivind Eklund <eeklund@gmail.com> wrote:
> To my mind, the "right" way to deal with this particular issue would
> probably be to have RubyGems automatically patch itself on update,
> keeping the old paths around in the new "binary".  Yeah, it's icky.

It's completely wrong and completely *not* RubyGems responsibility.
RubyGems shouldn't be patching/diffing. Do you know of *any* program
that does that?

This problem isn't RubyGems problem. While I might agree that
environment variables aren't ideal (they're not), they are the way
that RubyGems works.

Don't like it and have a better idea? Provide patches. Patches that
would make RubyGems work around a patched version of RubyGems, though,
should be rejected with force.

> It seems less icky than the alternative, which is an application that
> needs environment variables to work correctly, and (from a user's
> perspective, as seen by the initial complaint) mess up in the absence
> of them

The problem is that Mr. Greenly did something that shouldn't have been
allowed. It's not RubyGems responsibility to prevent that; it's the
Debian maintainers responsibility to disallow it if they're going to
incompatibly (and stupidly) change a package that they're maintaining.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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               * austin@zieglers.ca