From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2003-04-09T03:01:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Call for standardised package installation procedure

Hi,

From: "Mauricio Fern�ndez" <batsman.geo@yahoo.com>
>
> On Tue, Apr 08, 2003 at 11:19:42PM +0900, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> > The OS package management system will never serve all needs, so if
> > "having some installed this way and some installed that way" is your
> > concern, then it will never be the solution.
>
> I'd appreciate if you gave one need impossible to satisfy with the
> scheme I proposed in my previous message and easily handled by the
> "pure-Ruby solution". I believe the "Pure-Ruby" solution is not
> necessarily more flexible or powerful, as we can always try to add
> whatever is needed upstream (that is, integrated into the dists,
> by going through the effort of becoming a member or contacting one
> official developer).

For my part, I'm currently doing Ruby on Windows, Linux, and
Mac OS X...  I'd expect a "pure Ruby" installer to work the same
way, from a command-line standpoint, on each of these systems...

Why should I have to use (whatever) on Mandrake, "fink" on OS X,
and (...what, InstallShield? ;) on Windows to install Ruby
packages?

Perhaps I'm not understanding this discussion... but the idea of
the installation procedure for Ruby modules being different on each
platform seems unfortunate to me.  Isn't that what this whole thread
is about or started out as, a standardized installation procedure? :)

So many Ruby modules are platform-independent... It just seems
whacky to me from an authoring standpoint to be wanting to
release the latest version of my module, but telling people, well,
you'll have to wait until somebody "ports" my platform-independent
module to your specific OS's package manager before you have a
convenient way to install it.

"Standardizing" on a platform-specific installation procedure for
Ruby seems to me somewhere between ironic and oxymoronic....

But... just my $0.02...


Regards,

Bill