From: Luis Lavena <luislavena@...>
Date: 2008-05-15T07:35:03+09:00
Subject: Can platform agnosticism be achieved?

Hello List,

I've been asking myself this question for quite some time, as Windows
user
need to break the rules and do things that don't work out of the box
with Ruby.

I know Ruby has it's root in posix and *nix OS, where things like
drive letters don't exist and full power is just four letters away
(sudo).

Since last year, I've decided to spend more time helping great OSS
Ruby
projects to Windows users, and in doing so, I review, check and edit
a lot of projects on rubyforge, github and other esoteric places.

The thing is I'm a bit annoyed of adding regexp around things like
sudo in Rakefiles. Yeah, it's annoying, 4 letters ends up adding 20
bytes
more just to avoid typing sudo in front of the rake command
you're calling.

Take as example the following gem install rake tasks (from DataMapper
and Merb dev):

 namespace :gems do
   desc 'Uninstall all RubyGems for this project'
   task :wipe do
     sudo = RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /win32|cygwin/ ? '' : 'sudo'
     sh "#{sudo} gem uninstall #{project} --all --ignore-dependencies
--executables; true"
   end
 end

You see a big condition for sudo there. Take out of the consideration
that the regexp don't cover mingw as valid platform, or even don't
consider mswin64 (build of ruby 1.9 with VC9 for 64bits).

So, that regexp will become obsolete with time, at least for
Windows...
and the Windows folks will be required to patch it every time.

What about remove sudo from there and leave up to the user to make
that
decision? One example:

User perform some apt-get (ubuntu) tasks that requires sudo. He enters
his password to confirm the operation.
Under the same session, a few minutes later, he fires a rake task that
uses sudo, by mistake or because is not clearly advertised what It
does, he ends up messing with his gem repository, removing gems maybe
he
is using for other projects.

So, these rake tasks are doing more than they should, taking
privileges out of user hand and automating them, hiding the problem
when looking answer to "what happened?".

Or maybe I'm wrong, someone will say shut up or a flame war will get
started...

For the time being, those Windows user that don't want to patch a lot
of rakefiles that: 1) ignores platforms like mingw and java under
Windows (dunno how to get that), or 2) clearly ignores sudo is not
usable under windows.

> type sudo.bat

@ECHO OFF
REM
REM Fake sudo for Windows
REM This help avoid tools that forces usage of 'sudo' on all the
REM platforms, not just *nix ones.
REM
REM Save this file as 'sudo.bat' and place it somewhere in your PATH
REM (ruby/bin is a good place too).
REM
CALL %*

Regards,
--
Luis Lavena