From: Chad Fowler <chad@...>
Date: 2004-05-01T19:07:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Opportunities and pitfalls; was "Introducing myself - Sascha Ebach"


On 1/5/2004, at 4:40 AM, Thomas Fini Hansen wrote:

> On Sat, May 01, 2004 at 06:52:40AM +0900, Chad Fowler wrote:
>> You could actually use RubyGems to create a distro like this.   
>> There's
>> no reason you can't create a "super gem" that does nothing but list
>> dependencies.  So, for example, you could create a package for your
>> favorite XML tools and call it hubbart-xml.   All it would do is 
>> depend
>> on all of the gems (including versions, if you like) that you want to
>> include, and those would be auto-installed when you install
>> hubbart-xml.  Then, of course, you could package several such 
>> meta-gems
>> into a "super gem", say "hubbart-big-enchilada" that would cause all 
>> of
>> your favorite stuff to get installed with the simple command:
>
> Dude, you're describing how Debians apt system works. ;)
>

And many other package managers, I guess? :)

> Which reminds me. As much as CPAN and RubyGems are nice, they doesn't
> interact too well with the packagemanagers on Linux. Or rather, at
> all. Anyone working on this?
>
> As far as I know, on Debian it should be possible for RubyGems to
> generate and inject a stub package that allows one to apt-get
> update/remove the gem, if it was installed as root.
>

This (not just Debian) has been on the TODO list since RubyConf.  We 
just haven't made it a priority yet.  Obviously, it will be hard for us 
to address every single package manager that exists, so anyone who 
wants to create a gem -> their_favorite_package_manager convertor is 
VERY welcome.

Chad