From: Eivind Eklund <eeklund@...>
Date: 2007-11-22T23:41:49+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyGems 0.9.5

On Nov 22, 2007 1:38 PM, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
[About stuff]
> Bad. Special case for a mere distro.

"Distro" is a synonym for "operating system".

Saying "mere operating system" comes across to me as arrogant.
Actually, saying "mere" about ANYTHING that your discussion opponent
is talking about comes across as arrogant to me.

I think we'd get much farther with the discussions here if we kept the
negative comments about stuff to a minimum and instead looked at the
real problems and looked for solutions to them.  As it is, your text
comes across to me as full of inflammatory attacks on everything in an
effort to defend the status quo.  I hope you will choose to
communicate better than that, as I've previously seen a lot of
well-reasoned stuff from you, so I know you can.

> On 11/22/07, Michael Greenly <mgreenly@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Using environment variables to override locations makes sense for end
> > users but not for base system configuration.  Either using a file in
> > rubylibdir or a value in rbconfig both seem like excellent choices.  Or
> > better yet using all these methods in an ordered evaluation seems the
> > best choice.
>
> Disagree re: environment variables. There are exactly two environment
> variable schemes that have to be patched:
>
>    export FOO=bar
>    set FOO bar

This doesn't cover zsh (which is fairly mainstream), not to mention
bush, esh, osh, or other "weird" shells.  Also, of the two cases you
covered, one is wrong, though that's easily fixed by changing "set" to
"setenv".

Environment variables as base configuration has a number of
significant flaws, and to the best of my knowledge generally isn't
supported by OS installer systems.  They are meant for per user/per
invocation configuration.  System configuration is done in files or as
executable changes (or in the case of Windows, through the registry).
Bastardizing general environment variables for it just creates
trouble.

There is another solution that might work for the Debian packagers, though:

Just use a wrapper script.  Thinking about this, we've done this for a
number of things that use env virables as configuration in FreeBSD,
and it should avoid the present problem, assuming that RubyGems will
update the "real" executable and not the wrapper script.  Of course,
unless RubyGems hook correctly into dpkg, there might be a checksum
problem on uninstall, and extra files might be left over.

Eivind.