[CentOS] Installing Ruby gems on RPM-based systems

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2011-10-08 at 05:46 -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> --On Saturday, October 08, 2011 6:29 AM -0700 Craig White 
> <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
> 
> > CentOS 6 is new so there's little experience with running ruby packages
> > on it but there's really no problem with running 'gem install
> > $SOME_PACKAGE' on any system. Realistically, the available rpm packages
> > are never going to keep up with the gems so after you get the base ruby
> > rpm packages installed (ruby/ruby-irb/ruby-ri/ruby-rdoc/ruby-gems) you
> > should probably just quit there and use the built-in gem package
> > provider to do everything else. Also, if you are talking about something
> > like a Ruby on Rails solution, the more organized setups will use
> > 'bundler' to get the application up to speed rather quickly.
> 
> That makes sense.
> 
> I played a little with gem2rpm but to really be useful there should be a 
> yum repository of standard gems that tracks whatever ruby's normal upstream 
> repositories hold (its CPAN equivalent).
----
gem development is too fast/furious for any type of distribution native
packaging to reasonably keep up. I've never actually looked at any
gem2rpm thing and the thought of doing so seems ridiculous to me.

I've been using ruby stuff since 2005 and I pretty much avoid the
distribution packages. FWIW, I don't use the native RPM ruby packages on
CentOS and likewise, don't use the native DPKG ruby packages on Ubuntu
and use Enterprise Ruby either.

Eventually it becomes obvious that to do anything serious with ruby, the
OS packages lag behind and become the problem. If you are doing
lightweight things, then you can probably get by. Certainly for
someone's first foray into ruby, CentOS 6 ruby packages are sufficient
and once you have the base installation, the gem packaging provider can
handle things quite well.

Craig


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