From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2007-11-22T21:27:14+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyGems 0.9.5

On 11/21/07, Michael Greenly <mgreenly@gmail.com> wrote:
> Austin Ziegler wrote:
> > I'd rather see RubyGems team spend its effort making sure that it
> > works well with MRI, XRuby, JRuby, Ruby.NET, IronRuby, etc. than
> > wasting their time trying to please Debian zealots who can't be
> > bothered to think beyond their noses.
> It's became very obvious to me who the anti-debian zealot is.  You may
> not use it or even care about it, personally I could care less if Ruby
> was supported on Windows at all but that wouldn't cause me to lobby
> against making allowances for it's support.

I'm anti-Debian-meddling. Not anti-Debian. (I use and recommend Ubuntu
regularly. The Debian Ruby packages, however, are a complete nightmare
to be avoided at all costs.)

Windows is a special case only because there's not typically a
compiler (but RubyGems should do more for environments that don't have
a compiler, because I don't necessarily *want* a compiler installed on
a production Ubuntu server, thank you VERY much).

You'll also note that what special support has been added to RubyGems
for Windows beyond a reasonable minimum was added through patches
offered by people affected by the problems. Plus, the Windows support
for Ruby is entirely community-provided, whereas Debian wants to be a
one-stop package repository. Well, they're failing the Ruby community
badly.

You want to fix RubyGems on Debian? Quit your bitching and offer some
damned patches already. Just remember that some of those patches have
to go to the Debian maintainers. Probably most of them.

I see no reason that Eric Hodel or anyone else should fix your problem
for you just because you choose to use a package that's *broken on
purpose* by the OS maintainers. I'd say the same thing if Apple had
done something similar. Microsoft isn't involved in making packages
for Windows Ruby.

The RubyGems team isn't perfect, but what they're providing is a
*Ruby* facility. If your OS isn't up to snuff, then it's up to you to
either not use what your OS provides or to get your OS up to snuff.
Nothing less, nothing more.

I just wish Debian users would stop bitching about this and *do* something.

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