Re: ruby 1.9.1 will be ruby's stable release in december
Hi,
On 18/10/07 at 23:38 -0300, Grabber wrote:
> Why we need have packages from gems in Debian? Why we not use gems same at
> cpan?
I'm not sure of what you mean with "why we not use gems same at cpan".
We in any case, Debian's SC states that "our priorities are our users
and free software". ;)
If you mean "we could simply let our users download gems using 'gem
install', and not provide packages", it's true that it's a solution. But
some libraries provided as gems are really common (think of the typical
rails installations), so it's better if they are available as packages,
simply because it makes our users' life easier.
If you mean "we could download the gems from rubyforge or elsewhere, and
package them normally by dropping the gem-specific bits.", that's what
we are currently doing. The problem is that it's hard to do, because
rubygems is source-intrusive: developers add require_gem instructions to
specify the libs' dependancies. We can patch, but the problem arises
when a user wants to install a lib that was not packaged, or a newer
version of a lib that was packaged. In that case, the gem will complain
that it can't find its dependencies, and will try to download a lot of
gems that we already have (as degemified libs).
So it's probably better to package some libs as gems, especially when
other gems use it. It's basically what the python folks do with Python
eggs.
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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