Re: ruby 1.9.1 will be ruby's stable release in december

[Vincent Fourmond <fourmond@debian.org>]

  Hello !

Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>> Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>>> - library installation paths (see #446220):
>>>   a common complain heard about Debian's ruby is that we install all
>>>   libs in /usr/lib/ruby/1.8, mixing stdlib and third party libs. It
>>>   would be a good idea to move away from that in ruby1.9.
>> It's not so much related to the ruby package itself. The packages 
>> incriminated are those for third party libs AND programs (many programs 
>> install files in lib/ and "require" them from the main file).
>>
>> Personally, I see advantages to the current approach : it makes a clear 
>> distinction between packages installed with apt-get and packages installed 
>> by hand. Since packages installed by hand have priority according to 
>> $LOAD_PATH, this is just fine to me.
> 
> I think that packages installed by hand go to
> /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8, at least when installed with setup.rb. It
> would be really wrong if packages installed by hand would go somewhere
> under /usr/lib/.

  I think we all agree. We are speaking about Ruby programs that user
download, say, from Rubyforge, and install with a mechanism such as
setup.rb or extconf.rb. These really should go in
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby - any other behaviour would be confusing.

  Debian packages should never have a file in /usr/local. So, it seems
we have two options:

  * either keep it the way it is run currently, that is debian -ruby
packages installing files into /usr/lib/ruby/$version/... This is
obviously the easiest way to go, as there is no work. But some people
are not satisfied with this solution, and even though it satisfies me, I
can pretty much see their point.

  * or create a whole brand new directory for debian -ruby packages. The
first idea that comes in my mind is /usr/lib/ruby/dist/$version/. It has
the obvious advantage of satisfying everyone, but at two costs:
  - we must patch Ruby to add the above directory in its search path
(which should be first /usr/local, then /usr/lib/ruby/dist, and finally
ruby's stdlib)
  - we must change all the packages currently in the archive (painful).
The good news is that only a minor tweak of ruby-pkg-tools would do the
trick for most packages but the ones configured and tweaked by hand.

  Cheers,

	Vincent, for his 2 cents

-- 
Vincent Fourmond, Debian Developer
http://vince-debian.blogspot.com/
-- pretty boring signature, isn't it ?