From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2008-12-27T06:32:28+09:00 Subject: Re: how to make installing Ruby easier for amateurs Dave Bass wrote: > Justin Collins wrote: >> But how a Linux distro packages it all up is not something with the >> developers of Ruby have control over (or very little, at least). > > Surely Ruby people should be talking to distro people, pointing out the > problems and suggesting fixes. It's in everyone's interest that Ruby be > easy to install. > > I too have run into problems trying to install Ruby on Ubuntu. I don't > care whose fault it is, or what the problem is, I just want it to work > first time like other packages do. Is that really too much to ask? > > David Every distro has a collection of Ruby-specific developers / packagers, and there are some Rubyists who are members of one or more distro communities as well. But ... I'd be extremely surprised if just "talking to distro people" is going to have any major effect on a community as large and as "religious" as Debian's, and by inheritance, all those distros that depend on the Debian repositories. On top of that, there are three major packaging systems: RPM, Debian and source tarballs plus scripts (Gentoo and Slackware, maybe others). The organization that defined the "Linux Standard Base" now has a subgroup that's concerned with unifying the whole package management area. It's not just Ruby, by the way ... distros have to also define the way they interact with the packaging subsystems and repositories of Perl, Python, R, TeX/LaTex, Tcl/Tk and some others I know little about. Of all the ones I've used, Gentoo's seems to be the easiest to work with as far as Ruby is concerned. For one thing, all the development tools -- gcc, make, automake, kernel source, etc. -- are part of the base install. You don't have to install them if you want to do something more involved than running existing applications. And second, building from source with scripts means it's easier to put a wrapper on a Ruby gem, or a CPAN package / bundle, etc. and put the Ruby or Perl or Python dependencies into the distro's dependency structure. And third, when they build from source, they install all the headers -- there's no separate "-devel" package you need to install! -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P), WOM I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.