[CentOS] recent ruby packages?

Tue Feb 5 14:55:23 UTC 2013
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

James B. Byrne wrote:
> On Mon, February 4, 2013 19:01, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Craig White <craig.white at ttiltd.com>
>> wrote:
<snip>
> It is a good thing in the sense that the cost of entry for developers
> who provide Ruby extensions is very, very, low as all platforms Ruby
> runs on are essentially supported out of the box by RubyGems.  If one
> becomes expert at RPM package building on RHEL/CentOS then how exactly
> does that expertise translate from RHEL into say Debian; or BSD; or
> OSX; or MS-Windows?  It does not.  On the other hand, any non-native
> language extension released as a RubyGem and pushed to rubygems.org is
> instantly available on every platform running a comparable version of
> Ruby.

As I keep noting, many perl CPAN packages are available as rpms - I know,
since my manager prefers we not build any from CPAN unless it's a) not
available from a trusted repository as an rpm, and b) actually required by
a developer. As an rpm, of course, if there's an update, it'll get taken
care of the next update we do; otherwise, we have to remember which of our
150 or so systems has what that has to be built. It's bad enough to have
to remember which ones I have to build the NVIDIA drivers on....
<snip>
> released.  In such cases a system level application package management
> system is simultaneously too large and too small for Ruby gems.  It is
> too big in that it requires too much overhead to get it to work at
> all.  It is too small because it only handles one Linus distribution
> and does nothing at all for any non-linux OS.

Most other cross-platform projects do it.
<snip>
> As for not getting 'it' right, whatever 'it' is, Ruby is not a single
> implementation.  The baseline is the MRI but there exists several
> alternative implementations including one written in Java.  Each of
<snip>
A version of ruby, a scripting language, written in Java? Please tell me
which one, so I can prevent ANYONE HERE from EVER looking into that....

       mark "why, yes, I *do* loathe java; ruby is merely an
                annoying pain"