From: Mark Wilson <mwilson13@...>
Date: 2003-05-06T13:43:38+09:00
Subject: Re: A wishlist for a "Ruby Standard Library"

[snipped many wonderful things.]

I think a "fat" distribution would be a good idea. The libraries don't 
have to be called "standard" either. A fat distribution would have 
almost all libraries in their current version and as many of the old 
versions of these libraries that the developer thinks appropriate to 
include for backward compatibility.

An alternative to this would be to include "stub" files for all 
versions of all libraries and, if a new application or library needed a 
particular library, the installer could go get it. In this case, the 
fat distribution wouldn't actually be "distributed" until an element 
was needed.

Gerben Weirda has done something like this for Tex on Mac OS X. He 
uses, and created, i-Installer, which is a neat application for 
end-user package management. His i-Installer site is at:

http://www.rna.nl/ii.html

An i-Installer for Ruby is on my wishlist.