Hello everyone, It has been a while since I think about ways to make the Ruby stack in Debian more useful for people who do not want, or can't, use all of it. For example, some people might might be ok with the version of Ruby itself we ship, but not with our version of Rails. For example right now we plan to not ship Rails 3.2 with jessie, but the userbase for Rails 3.2 seems to be quite high. In other cases, people want to install Ruby applications from Debian like vagrant, chef, redmine, and the versions of the libaries pulled in as dependencies of those packages are not compatible with something else that they need to deploy to the same system, such as some in-house application. People might solve this type of issue by just using RVM/ruby-build/chruby and not use the Ruby intepreter provided by Debian at all. But then, they have to provide security upgrades for the interpreter (arguably one of the most sensitive layers of the stack) themselves, while if they were using Debian's interpreter, they would be notified about security upgrades for Ruby just as they are for everything else that is provided by Debian, and security updates are easier and require less effort. I have made an attempt at implementing a mechanism for solving this problem, and came up with ruby-standalone. http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/ruby-standalone.git From the package description: This package provides a Ruby interpreter without providing support for other Debian-provided Ruby packages, i.e. it won't use any code from Debian packages that provide Ruby libraries, Rubygems won't recognize libraries installed with Debian packages etc. . This package is mostly useful for server deployments or development environments where one wants or needs to obtain the Ruby interpreter from Debian, but install everything else from sources external to Debian such as rubygems.org. . No offical Debian Ruby packages, application or library, should depend on this one. See also the README file: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/ruby-standalone.git/tree/README.md And the debconf question that gets asked on installation: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/ruby-standalone.git/tree/debian/ruby-standalone.templates ruby-standalone is not only co-installable with the regular Ruby interpreter, but actually uses it under the hood. I would like your feedback. - what do you think? is this useful? is this a terrible idea? - is there anything else that needs to be considered? - do you have use cases that ruby-standalone could support, but doesn't? Do you have a patch or a hint on how to do it? -- Antonio Terceiro <terceiro@debian.org>
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