From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2002-12-13T07:27:33+09:00
Subject: Re: [RCR] replace setup.rb/install.rb with builtin module

In article <87lm2v0xen.fsf@squeaker.lickey.com>,
Matt Armstrong  <matt@lickey.com> wrote:
>ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) writes:
>
>> By proposing this as an RCR I am implying that package creation and
>> installation methods should be an integral part of Ruby, not a
>> peripheral issue.
>
>I think it is pretty clear that any packaging system would be made
>more convenient to use when bundled with the standard ruby
>distribution.
>
>There are a number of Ruby packaging systems being developed and
>hopefully one will eventually "win."  When/if that happens I'd be
>happy if it were made part of Ruby's standard distribution.  Until
>then it seems premature.  

I'm merely trying to speed up that 'until then'.  We really need to decide 
this issue soon IMHO.  

I mentioned raa-install because I've used it.  Haven't tried rpkg, though 
I think it doesn't work with the RAA (they have their own repository, am I 
right?) so it seems like an advantage for raa-install.  

Choice is a double-edged sword: usually the benefits outweigh the 
negatives, however in this case I think it's time to narrow our choices 
so that we're not as a community developing 3 or 4 different types of 
incompatible packages.  If we don't decide then the community (which still 
isn't that large) becomes balkanized with multiple, incompatible packaging 
formats and lots of brain cycles get wasted on trying to figure out which 
packaging system to use when we package our projects.

The nice thing about raa-install is that it works with the current 
infrastructure and should be easy to adapt to RAA.succ.

>E.g. whatever comes standard with Ruby
>should probably work seamlessly with RAA.succ, but that isn't done
>itself.

True.

The packaging system is sort of peripheral to the proposed RCR, though.  
The idea of this RCR is that we need an InstallPkg module which 
encapsulates the functionality of the Aoki-san's current install.rb 
script and it should be included with Ruby.  Doing this offers several 
advantages which have already been enumerated.  We should probably make it 
so we can plug in alternative packaging systems easily to InstallPkg - 
however I do believe there should be a default and at this point I'd vote 
for raa-install since it seems to be working.

Anyway, to summarize: anything we can do to make it easier to create 
packages will help us get more packages and I think that this proposal 
would really help.  Also, anything we can do to make it easier for people 
to get required packages from RAA or elsewhere on the web will go a long 
ways toward greater adoption of Ruby. 

Phil

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