From: Aldric Giacomoni <aldric@...>
Date: 2010-03-19T21:56:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Recommended way to install Rubygems

Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 19/03/10 at 06:44 +0900, John W Higgins wrote:
> 
>> ebuild (including full dependency checks from the gem itself). Does it work
>> flexibility - again looking at Gentoo it somehow, in a very much automated
>> fashion, manages to handle all these wild and wacky libraries.
>> 
>> In fact you might want to look at Gentoo as a way to create sources packages
>> because it seems to handle all your issues and will present a nice simple
>> tar.bz2 package of the files that might be much easier to work with in
>> regards to your need for standardization. And I'm truly not saying that to
>> be an idiot or anything - it really seems like Gentoo has solved the issues
>> you are having, at least with respect to getting the files into some form of
>> a constant layout which may be of great help to you.

Well.. Gentoo also builds from source, so it tends to have all the 
header files! In addition, it doesn't shy away from adding requirements 
to ebuilds. I had an issue, in fact, where xemacs kept on being 
re-installed on my machine, and I eventually tracked the problem down to 
a specific USE flag on my (cue suspenseful music) dev-lang/ruby package. 
That's right.. Ruby required xemacs;-) I removed the USE flag and xemacs 
never came back.

> I agree that we could have a better infrastructure on the Debian side to
> deal with that, and automate many of the tasks. None of the problems are
> particularly hard, we just all lack time (and motivation to work on a
> somehow poisonous issue).
> 
> I really think that, in the end, whether to plug into the gems system
> (like Gentoo does) or to leave it for manual installs by the user (like
> Debian does) is mainly a matter of taste.

This is true.

> Btw, I see in the github portage tree that former versions for gems are
> apparently no longer available. How do you deal with gems that require a
> specific (ancient) version of another gem?

Besides the official portage tree, there are overlays; there is an 
overlay dedicated to Ruby, which has much more than the regular tree. 
You are right, though - there is a limitation, and the limitation always 
is "Who has created an ebuild (or .deb package) for this version of the 
gem?"
If the version we need isn't in the tree or the overlay, then either we 
create an ebuild for it or we install it with rubygems.
-- 
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