From: Lucas Nussbaum Date: 2010-03-19T00:02:04+09:00 Subject: Re: Recommended way to install Rubygems On 18/03/10 at 23:31 +0900, James Edward Gray II wrote: > On Mar 18, 2010, at 9:05 AM, Nick Brown wrote: > > > But just yesterday I was trying to install mechanize (via rubygems) > > on my 9.10 system, and it kept failing because 'net/https' was > > missing. And I was scratching my head wonder why the heck a core > > piece of ruby like that wouldn't be there... > > I completely agree that the split sucks. We run a Ruby service that > requires our users to install a simple script on their servers. It > does use net/https to communicate, so about 80% of our support issues > on Debian systems are us explaining to users how to finish their Ruby > install. > > In my opinion, the problem is that the Debian maintainers have changed > what it means to install Ruby. That's not OK to me, because it's not > their call to make. The Ruby core team gets to decide what it means > to install Ruby. Apparently, the ruby core team is OK with the current situation, since apt-get install ruby1.9.1-full/ruby-full is advertised on http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/. You might want to educate your users to read the documentation. Also, I disagree that it's not our call to make. Most of the software shipped by Debian is split in seperate packages, and Ruby is the only case where I hear people complaining about such a minor issue. (Also note that the split predates me being involved in Ruby maintenance.) > All of the standard libraries are meant to be > installed so you can count on having them. By changing that decision, > Debian has made it so you can't count on having them and that changes > the rules of what you can do with Ruby. If, maybe, the Ruby community fixed the fact that it's illegal to load all of stdlib in the same process (because of OpenSSL vs GPL), we could consider including ssl and readline in the default lib pkg. However, I don't see how we will make Ruby depend on installing Tcl/Tk (because of the TK bindings), or Emacs (because of the ruby mode for emacs). Note that even ruby-full doesn't install the TK and elisp stuff. -- | Lucas Nussbaum | lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ | | jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |