From: Yohanes Santoso <ysantoso@...>
Date: 2003-02-07T06:28:51+09:00
Subject: Re: The way of the Gentoo

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"MikkelFJ" <mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com> writes:

> 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?

This has been hashed out numerous times in this list. There are
already ruby package manager that do dependency checking, raa-install and
portupgrades are some of the more famous ones. I am sure there are many others.

The question here is not, is it possible to have a package manager for
ruby. The question is: which package manager will win.

I have been trying to modifying portupgrade (of FreeBSD) so that it
works on non-BSD system. At the same time, I am also modifying apt (of
Debian) so that it works on non-Debian system. Both are excellent and
mature package managers. I am currently torn between the two, although
I am leaning slightly on the direction of apt.

portupgrade is written in ruby, which gives a nice ego
boost. Unfortunately: 1. cannot easily select a specific version to
install. 2. no alternative UI in the class of aptitude, 3. present a
problem of requiring ruby to install ruby. #3 is a problem if
portupgrade is used on a system without ruby, but this is not a big
deal since ruby can also be shipped along with portupgrade. minor
problem.

apt is written in C and binaries for various OSes can be produced so
that it can be used to bootstrap ruby into a system without
ruby. There is also aptitude, a ncurses-based UI to apt, and it is
very useful to _browse_ the package selection. It also have a very
rich package building tools. Unfortunately, many of the package
building tools are written in perl; it takes away some ego. Yet, this
is not a major problem since this affects only the package builder
(which probably is not the package author).

In the end, I think the winner will be the one that provide the higher
total-value benefit which invariable means quality of supporting
applications (easiness to make a package, browsing/searching the
collection) and comprehensiveness of the package collection.

Let's see which one will win.

YS.
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