On 02/04/2013 11:36 PM, Craig White wrote: > > On Feb 4, 2013, at 3:54 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: > >> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 4:41 PM, Craig White <craig.white at ttiltd.com> wrote: >>> >>> ---- >>>> You, on the other hand, have already come here with the attitude of "my >>>> way or the highway"; this is *NOT* the way to encourage folks to change >>>> their minds.* Nor is it helpful to me. >>> ---- >>> not really - it's that you don't have much first hand experience so since you can't merely type 'yum install rails' and be done with it, it confuses you. >> >> The confusing thing is that for almost everything else that is useful, >> stable, and publicly available, someone will maintain packages. If >> they aren't accepted in the distribution or in EPEL, the projects >> generally have their own repo for them. So why did you have to roll >> your own installer, and why do you thing that is a good thing? > ---- > there may very well be ruby versions in EPEL, I don't know and never looked. > > I also never 'rolled my own installer' - the 2 'ruby managers' (rbenv and rvm) have that functionality. > > When you are developing, it became necessary to maintain applications undoubtedly on ruby 1.8.7 and work on new applications (1.9.3x) and so have a version manager for ruby was essential - that's why they were created. > > FTR… rbenv & rvm are cross platform and recommended not only for Linux but also for Macintosh (as opposed to using Apple's supplied ruby). Windows is less than optimal for ruby/ruby on rails. > > What we are discussing here is more likely deployment servers and CentOS-5.x is stuck on ruby-1.8.5 which is pretty much useless and CentOS-6.x is as I understand it, stuck on ruby-1.8.7. Even still, the enterprise ruby package (1.8.7) is vastly superior to RH's build and if you are running an application that you care about, you would want to use that or better yet, ruby 1.9.3x has vastly improved performance of all 1.8.7 builds. > > By the way, I am pretty certain that PuppetLabs (puppet) maintains ruby packages for CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Windows too. > > And lastly, Ruby is an ecosystem far beyond the base language. It has a 'gem' package management system which again is cross platform and even when you try to package ruby in rpm's, there's no way an RH or EPEL will keep up with updates. Puppet is available via EPEL & as a separate rpm for Fedora. It "works" on basically any distro. Fedora's Ruby is 'ruby 1.9.3p362 (2012-12-25 revision 38607) [x86_64-linux]' which is the latest stable version & can be installed via yum. As I mentioned before, rvm is invaluable (to me at any rate) for managing Rubies & their associated gemsets & was written with large scale deployments in mind. I find it unfortunate that the myth is still being perpetuated about its so called shortcomings albeit generally by people who have never used it to any great extent. They also tend to imply that Ruby equals Rails & vice versa (which is kind of like saying Python equals Django). Cheers, Phil... -- currently (ab)using CentOS 5.8 & 6.3, Debian Squeeze & Wheezy, Fedora Beefy & Spherical, Lubuntu 12.10, OS X Snow Leopard & Ubuntu Precise & Quantal GnuPG Key : http://www.horse-latitudes.co.uk/publickey.asc