From: gsemones@... (Guerry Semones)
Date: 2003-05-07T01:27:33+09:00
Subject: Re: A wishlist for a "Ruby Standard Library"

To play devil's advocate here, I'd rather have more of a CPAN type of
solution available, where it is easy to acquire and install modules,
rather than have them all bundled into the "official" distribution.

The whole Java experience has soured me on the concept of fat
distributions.  We have Java integrated into our product, and which
"version" of Java to officially support / test / etc. is nightmarish. 
Why?  Recently I had to jump through a series of recent Java releases,
and was really perturbed to see that most of the bug fixes were Swing
related - NOT core Java.  Guess what?  Our product does NOT care about
Swing, but since they have to keep tweaking it, we have to keep
overhauling which versions to support so our customers can use them.

Java should ship as a core set of libraries (NOT including Swing and
some others), and then allow for other auxiliary libs to be added by
those that need them.  This idea is not original with me.  Alot of
people want this.

Now, having said that, I'd hate to see Ruby and its "releases" get
bolluxed up by including auxiliary libs that aren't core.

Rather, let's just make it easier to get, check dependencies, compile,
install, and test add-on Ruby libs like unto CPAN and the FreeBSD
package distributions.

Thanks,

Guerry

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