From: "Hal E. Fulton" Date: 2003-02-13T08:57:10+09:00 Subject: Re: Can we attack the 'not enough libraries' thing straight on? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Lawrence" To: "ruby-talk ML" Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 5:34 PM Subject: Re: Can we attack the 'not enough libraries' thing straight on? > Well, I'm saying negative things. CPAN (the Module) has given me too many > problems over the last year or so. It seems to work equally badly on all > platforms. I hope I'll never have to deal with it again. Do you think the problems are (in principle) fixable if we implement a Ruby tool similar in spirit? > > I gather then that you come down heavily in favor of > > the "universal smart installer." > > > > I'd love to see a standard emerge and then become > > universally used. Right now we have raainstall and > > rpkg, neither of which I'm familiar with. As far as > > I know, these are nowhere near universal nor are > > they compatible with each other. There are probably > > others also. > > I don't quite agree. I really don't want another package manager for Ruby > add-ons that doesn't play nicely with the package manager for the system. > I've spent too many years doing sys admin in large data centers and have > seen too many problems when each box is configured by hand. I'd really > like to see .rpm, .deb, etc. packages generated. > > I know it's an unpopular view, but I'm sticking to it. I can see that. Is there some kind of compromise possible? For example, can we divide this into three issues? 1. the repository; 2. the data format; 3. the install tool. Bear in mind here that while I have extensive UNIX background, I'm fairly Linux-ignorant. Supposing we stored alternative packages in the RAA (rpm, deb, etc.) Would the respective tools be smart enough to go to the RAA to get the packages? Or would we simply download and manually run the tool? Or could the RAA installer be smart enough to invoke the system package manager? In short, is there some not-too-unacceptable way to please everybody? Hal