From: Eivind Eklund Date: 2008-02-28T17:06:55+09:00 Subject: Re: Monkeypatching is Destroying Ruby On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Trans wrote: > On Feb 27, 8:30 am, "Eivind Eklund" wrote: > > > On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 7:25 PM, James Britt wrote: > > > Code that is poorly written or does not play well with others tends to > > > get discarded. > > > > We still have Gems, which don't play well at all with others (on a > > technical basis) - witness the conflicts with the Debian team, and > > what every other Unix package maintainer says about this. This proves > > that this mechanism doesn't work so well if there is a size/momentum > > advantage. > > I would now suggest that it is the FHS that is holding us back, not > the other way around --talk about your size/momentum advantage. > > Suggested reading: > > http://gobolinux.org/index.php?page=doc/articles/clueless I perfectly agree that a large part of the reason the FHS is the way it is (and why we're using FHS or something similar on most Unix systems) is historical momentum. I feel that's a tangent, though. In my opinion, the core issue is that people should be able to expect a single directory layout on a single operating system, so the operating system owns the directory layout. If you are going to write a package manager that works on different operating systems, it should be able to adopt to the conventions of those operating systems, or it hose the users of the operating systems. Users that don't care if a package is written in Ruby, or in Python, or in C, or whatever. I think having different operating systems - like GoboLinux, like Mac OS X, like Windows - that experiment with different layouts is a good thing. There may well be other layouts that work better than the traditional one these days. I just think this is an area for operating systems to experiment, not programming languages. Eivind.