The way of the Gentoo

I recently tried (as in not yet succeeded) to step into the world of Linux,
which let me to the way of the Gentoo.

Gentoo www.gentoo.org is a Linux distro that has a friendly (as in not /.)
community http://forums.gentoo.org/ but more to the point it has an amazing
distribution system called portage:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/portage-user.xml
Someone mentioned he preferred Gentoo mostly because of the nice colours
(and there may be some truth in that, looking at their documentation).

It downloads and synchronizes a list of available packages. It installs
software on demand including all dependencies.
Say you want VI: "emerge VI" and VI gets downloaded, build and installed in
the most recent stable version unless it's already installed.

"emerge KDE" and you can wait for long time first installing and building X
unless you have it installed. Actually a lot of  Gentoo mirrors are
currently bogged down due to the recent KDE 3.1 release.

Gentoo has a number of mirrors and a clear policy for synchronizing existing
mirrors and adding new mirrors. Essentially if you have sufficent diskspace
and a T1 uplink, you can be a mirror if you sync a specific times (to avoid
out of sync mirrors).

The happy user attaches to arbitrary mirrors due to a round robin DNS
feature, but you can also specify a mirror.

When new software enters gentoo for download (or a new version), an ebuild
is written specifying the requirements. I don't know the details, but
apparently it's easy to add your own ebuild if necessary. Therefore the
gentoo community is cabable of downloading new packages much earlier than
other distributions that need rpm packages or debian packages.

So what is my point? Of course you have already guessed what I'm hinting at:

Wouldn't it by out of the ordinary cool if Ruby had it's package system
working the same way as Gentoo? Possible even blatantly stealing the source
code for the purpose?

Obviously .rb files need no compilation but would still benefit from the
dedependency system. Binary packages do require compilation.

My major concern is that this approach in nature is Linux based. However, I
do not see what should prevent clients from running different operating
systems. The download protocol is http (wget) or ftp, or even local files.

Since Ruby already has decent configuration scripts to build .so modules on
various system (native Windows MSVC, mingw, cygwin, linux etc.) I reckon
this could be integrated into the client build system. Actually I reckon the
client could easily be written in Ruby - I suspect it's currently written in
Python although I havent investigated.

Gentoo also has various install stages for gentoo including boot strapping
gcc, installing precompiled gcc but compiling all other linux sources,
installing most of the system binary and only updating new version through
builds.
Likewise, Ruby could be distrubuted this way - I reckon it already is on
Gentoo (but I'm not that far into the install yet).

The next step would be integrating this system with FreeRide GUI.

I believe such a system would be an very significant part of moving Ruby to
a wider audience.
It would make it much more reliable to deploy Ruby solutions (even private
ones) becuase you'd only need a small script to emerge all the dependencies
of you app and a network of mirrors would ensure you could always get the
required package. Currently RAA is a link to a number of small unstable
servers and at best links to source forge projects where each dependency
most tediously be downloaded. Furthermore, the core Ruby installation could
be smaller because each user could easily add to the core. Authors of Ruby
applications no longer need to reimplement functionality because it would be
bad to depend on some mysterious package that would annoy potential users.
It would be easier to add mirrors than Gentoo: Gentoo requires about 256MB
of diskspace and T1, but Ruby would require much less space and any ADSL
uplink would be fast enough, provided there is an sufficient number of
mirrors. Thus the average Linux Ruby user could dedicate som diskspace if
they have a home server running.

Anyway, Gentoo proves that it is possible. All else being equal it should be
simpler for Ruby than for an entire bootstrapped OS.

This is just an idea for anyone to pick up. I know nothing of Linux or
Gentoo beside just trying to install it and I doubt I'll find the time to
work on it myself.

I have noticed the discussion of a Ruby version of CPAN. I don't know
exactly how CPAN works wrt. dependencies. But being able to easily add
mirrors is apparently a feature of both CPAN and Gentoo.

Speaking of dependency checking like Gentoo's system: I have been working
with SCons 0.9 alpha - it's pretty good at only building the necessary stuff
although it has it's rough edges. I saw a benchmark where builds were much
faster than using make. SCons is written in Python.


Mikkel