From: Marnen Laibow-Koser Date: 2010-02-11T05:53:46+09:00 Subject: Re: Problems with RubyGems on a Debian machine Rick Denatale wrote: > On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Thomas Lucero > wrote: >> repositories are not always up-to-date, e.g. the latest Rails version is >> often not available. > > Yep. IMHO the requirements of the usual LAMP user of a Debian or other > packaged Linux distro are not the same as the typical rails developer. > The former usually wants a fairly stable platform, the latter wants > to keep up with the rapidly changing universe of Ruby, Rails, gems, > ... > > Ruby developers are used to, and a lot expect, the ability to quickly > upgrade, and even deal with multiple versions on the same box for > different applications. Having multiple versions of ruby gems > installed has long been a feature of gems. Rails developers use > techniques like unpacking gems and rails itself into a vendor > directory of the app to allow different apps with different > requirements as to versions and sets of gems to run on the same box. > And today the state of the art is tools like RVM which allow multiple > versions and implementations of Ruby to coexist and be selectable. > You can have various versions of MRI (1.8.6, 1.8.7, 1.9.1) along with > Rubinius, JRuby, MagLev, (and on a Mac MacRuby). Right. > > The Debian packaging system is really built around having one version > of a given package installed at a time. The maintainers of ruby > packages for debian, occasionally take new versions and repackage > them. Waiting for that process is unacceptable for a lot of Ruby > developers. Also the repackaging sometimes takes some interesting > twists, at one point rails got repackaged, and the rails binary was > re-written as a bash shell script! I don't know if that's still the > case because... > > Early on in my use of Ruby, I was advised to just say no to the > packaged versions and build from source, On a Debian system just make > sure to install it somewhere which the packaging system doesn't muck > with, like /user/local/... I haven't used Debian as such for Ruby, but on Ubuntu the packaged Ruby is fine. No reason to build from source. > > And I pretty much do the same thing now that most of my development is > on OS X. What a waste of time, effort, and disk space. Leopard's version of MRI 1.8 is absolutely fine. I have had no problems with it at all. > > -- > Rick DeNatale > > Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/ > Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale > WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale > LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale Best, --  Marnen Laibow-Koser http://www.marnen.org marnen@marnen.org -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.