On Sat, 2008-12-06 at 18:17 +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > On 06/12/08 at 10:44 +1100, Nic Williams wrote: > > Hey everyone, (please reply-all or cc: me) > As a result, it's not easy to make them work together. I've been looking to package some Ruby libraries and so this issue is obviously quite important to me. I ran into a Ruby developer at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit a few weeks back and we had a discussion about this. To understand where I'm coming from, you need to know a little bit about the systems that I administer. I maintain shared-hosting web servers at an ISP. We don't do much Rails hosting right now, except that we're starting to use it internally. The outcome of the discussion we had is that we both feel that Debian should install "gems" into a system-wide location--as gems. (Apple apparently does this already.) Given that Debian has to follow the FHS, I would imagine this would end up being a tree of symlinks pointing at the FHS locations. This would be in GEM_PATH (which doesn't necessarily need to be setup as an environment variable per se; it could be patched in to the rubygems code). You'd continue to have GEM_HOME point to /var/lib/gems (or wherever it is now), which would also be in GEM_PATH. Thus, if a gem is installed system-wide via APT/dpkg, it will Just Work. However, if you install a gem using "gem install ...", that'll Just Work. Imagine these scenarios: 1. Richard wants to provide a number of common gems on his web servers for use by customers. 2. Bob, a customer of Richard's, needs a newer version of a gem than is installed system-wide. He wants to be able to drop a newer gem into his vendor dir and have it override the system-wide version for his website. 3. A security bug is found in a gem that Bob is using and Richard wants to install an even newer, patched version system-wide and have it override Bob's version. 4. Richard wants to provide a gem system-wide that is not packaged in Debian. He'd like to type "gem install FOO" and have it Just Work (until he can package the gem for Debian himself). I'm not sure that all of these work well right now. They would if Debian were installing (which, as I said, may mean symlinks) the gems *as gems*. Richard
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part