From: google@... (Tom Payne) Date: 2003-03-18T19:11:14+09:00 Subject: Re: Gentoo Administration I'm a big fan of both Gentoo and Ruby, but... "Simon ARNAUD" wrote in message news:... > I would also like a Gentoo-ruby advocacy group. I don't see much support > of ruby in gentoo, imo. Base install is ok, but not much else. Moreover, I > submitted some ebuilds (strscan, eruby), and I still don't see them in > portage. However, I know I should polish them, they ain't very good, and > not up to date now. Well, it's up to us to fix this. Gentoo has ruby-1.6.8, and when 1.8.0 is finally released that'll be in there quickly. I wrote a ruby-cvs ebuild, but it's generally more hassle than it's worth. As for Ruby packges from the RAA they still vary a lot in their build mechanisms, which is a shame. Specifically, most don't support the "make DESTDIR=/x/y/z install" idiom which makes writing correct and up-to-date ebuilds a chore. I suggest that when 1.8.0 comes out we contribute ebuilds for it and the commonly used RAA packages. In my experience, ebuilds are MUCH more likely to be accepted if they are 100% correct. Partial or buggy ebuilds are a real pain for the portage maintainers. > However, I'm not sure what to think of a ruby portage. I think, it would > be better to rewrite the whole portage in C, so noonehas to install a > script language (tcl, perl, python, ruby ...). But, it would also be a big > work, and harder to debug/modify. C is a bitch at times :). I don't think this is a good idea. Maintaining parallel Ruby and Python versions of portage would be a nightmare: portage changes regularly and keeping both versions in sync would be problematic. The portage hackers already know Python and reasonably would see no reason to change. As for re-writing in C: why? The slow parts of emerge are fetching, unpacking, and compiling, none of which would be speeded up by using C. It would just make it much much harder to modify and improve the program. IIRC there is a Gentoo like distribution that uses Ruby rather than Python, but I can't remember it's name. One of the many great things about Gentoo is that both the portage tree and the package database are stored in plain text (unlike, for example, RPM). This makes querying it really easy even from the command line (e.g. you can list installed packages by typing "ls /var/db/pkg/*/*/*.ebuild | cut -d/ -f5-6"). This makes writing a Ruby query tool really easy too. Regards, Tom