[CentOS] recent ruby packages?

[James B. Byrne]

On Mon, February 4, 2013 10:21, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Does anyone know of a repository that's *trustworthy* (gotta worry
> 'bout malware) with newer ruby rpm's than RHEL has?

I have not found one yet.

>
> OT: the more I deal with ruby, the less I like it. Someone here was
> ready to move to a newer version, and from the ruby.org website,
> they're apparently actively hostile to all RH-related distros,
> even though we're the most common in North America. They've got
> a how to do it from debian and arch, how to use their own installer,
> and, oh, yes, they say a lot of their community feels you should
> build from source.

As the man says, Ruby is open source.  If you have an itch then
scratch it yourself.  I had much the same issue with Ruby albeit on
three platforms simultaneously, MS-Win, Apple-OSX and RHEL-Linux.  In
the end I went with Ruby Version Manager to save my sanity.

However, RVM is a very intrusive bit of environment scripting and so I
later switched to RBENV.  That is a little lighter but I was still not
satisfied with the amount of background work required to get Rails
deployments to work with RVM/RBENV on different hosts.  For
development either RVM or RBENV is almost certainly the way to go for
non-sysadmins.  For deployments I am not so sure.

I ended up building my own rpm packages using rpmdev and mock.  After
avoiding the issue for years I discovered that rolling your own rpms
for Ruby is pretty simple, once you get a working spec file (which I
eventually discovered and stole).  If you care to go down that road I
have provided a write up (spec file included) online at:

http://byrnejb.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/building-ruby-1-9-3-for-centos-6-3/

>
> Sorry, that's not my idea of a stable language that I'd ever recommend
> to someone....
>
>         mark

Yeah, well I can recall spending weeks on the phone with HP's tech
response centre in Raleigh trying to get Cobol II to work as
documented.  Nobody asked me for my recommendation either.

As for providing the packages, I am willing to send them to whoever
wishes to host them.  Even to CentOS extras if anyone would be kind
enough to guide me through the administrative procedure to do so.



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