From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-02-15T01:44:10+09:00
Subject: Re: simple ruby project layout question

Tom Cloyd wrote:
> So, in the Ruby world, \bin simply means "whatever I'm using to launch 
> my program", if it's used at all, right? And "\bin" is simply an 
> anachronism - has always been done that way?

Right -- and it's not unique to Ruby either.

 From your use of backslashes, I'm guessing you're on Windows, so I can 
see your confusion. On Unix, quite often you find shell scripts in 
various bin directories. A few examples from my system: /bin/which, 
/usr/bin/git-svn, etc.

I think the reason it's done this way is that once upon a time, most or 
all of the files in those system directories were binary executables. 
People probably started putting scripts there because it was already in 
the PATH anyway, and it makes sense -- in the above example, all the 
user really cares about is git-svn is another git command, so to be 
consistent, why not put all of Git together? Even if most commands are 
binary, but some are Perl scripts?

So, in the Ruby world, bin is just "executables", binary or otherwise, 
as distinct from lib, where you would find library code. Both are ruby 
files, but bin/foo you might actually expect to set executable and run 
as a command, whereas if you did the same to lib/foo.rb, it probably 
wouldn't do anything.