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@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"