From: Aredridel <aredridel@...>
Date: 2003-05-07T02:37:41+09:00
Subject: Re: A wishlist for a "Ruby Standard Library"

> 1. I do favor a "relatively lean and mean" Ruby installation.
> Some of the "extras" should be included, but most should not.

I agree here -- have a way to strip the distribution to minimal size,
for a project/area where that's neccesary.  In PHP, that's with
--disable=all to ./configure; to Ruby, that might be downloading a small
package or a similar situation as PHP.

> 2. I do also think that installation should be quick and 
> painless and automated. raa-install is a step in the right
> direction. I haven't looked at other alternatives.

Definately -- though one nightmarish thing on a system that's
package-managed is running a second, more limited package manager for a
subset of the packages.

By this, I mean that I'd rather have RPM manage my perl modules than
CPAN (and thankfully, PLD provides a huge part of CPAN as RPMs, through
no small effort of the distributors); Similarly with Python, Ruby and
other languages.  It makes system administration an order of magnitude
easier when you can rely on the system package manager for everything.

> 3. I also think that the contents of the RAA should be kept
> on the RAA site itself, instead of (in addition to?) keeping
> pointers to other sites. 

Yes.  And mirrors.  (And I'm not talking about emulating
prdownloads.sourceforge.net here, which is the /worst/ way to do it)

> 4. To merge with the "PHP is popular" thread: I think it 
> might be a good idea to make a "Ruby/Web" installation
> (which would be a "fat" installation). This would include
> eruby, REXML, and who knows what else.

Yes!  Perhaps a small, well-maintained set of fat distros:  "Huge" (GUI
+ Web + everything), "Web" (XML, templating, eruby, mod_ruby), "GUI"
(FXRuby), and "core" (Just the small, standard library.)

It really shouldn't be that much of a maintenance nightmare, assuming
one has learned some of the lessons that package managers have taught
under linux in the last five years...