From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-08-17T13:28:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Unix Philosophy in Ruby Programing

On Monday, August 16, 2010 07:52:40 am Marc Weber wrote:
> Excerpts from Diego Bernardes's message of Mon Aug 16 14:34:19 +0200 2010:
> > Why build a gem/program to send mail if you can send with sendmail?
> > Why build process monitor if you can use monit?
> > And so..
> 
[snip]
> ...because Ruby can send emails even if there is no sendmail installed
> etc.

I don't really buy this as an argument. I'll respond directly in a separate 
email, but what if there's no Ruby interpreter installed? No rubygems? What if 
there's no mail gem installed?

The answer is, of course, you install it -- and systems like dpkg and rpm have 
been around a lot longer than rubygems.

Think about it -- most Rubyists are on some sort of unix, and most modern 
unices have these sorts of commands -- my servers have postfix, my laptop 
appears to have mailx. Why is it that we don't use the sendmail binary, 
whatever it happens to be pointing to?

There is a reason, but it's got nothing to do with "Oh noes, what if we have 
*gasp* dependencies! Whatever shall we do?"