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"