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Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer? The 'gem' command not working after installing the 'rubygems' package d

by heresy 16y ago

Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer? The 'gem' command not working after installing the 'rubygems' package does seem like a bit of a bug, to put it mildly, you'd think a cursory test by the maintainer would catch that.

davidw 16y ago
> Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer? Because he cares about the bug being fixed, rather than just whining? The point is to focus on fixing the system, not on pointing fingers or telling eachother to fuck off. The maintainer most likely already had the ruby-ssl package, and so the 'cursory test' worked for him. Look, I don't think the rubygems package on Debian is a fantastic bit of work, but ultimately: It's free software. If you don't like it, either help fix it or don't use it. Point it out if you like, but don't be such a dick about it.
- heresy 16y ago
  It's clear we disagree. The author put something out there under a free license, Debian benefits by including it in the distribution. There is no onus on the author whatsoever. People bitch because it's always Debian from which these problems originate. Mac OS X - Fine. FreeBSD - Fine. RedHat/CentOS - Fine. SuSE - Fine. Debian - Commands missing, functionality disabled, misconfigured.
  - davidw 16y ago
    The author put mongrel out there under a free license, as well as some unnamed gem, and various other things. The gem is not included in Debian. As to the "benefits" of Debian including anything, they certainly aren't pecuniary, but accrue mostly to the end users (or not, in this case). So, if you help Debian fix something, the beneficiaries are ultimately all the users of Debian, not really 'Debian' itself. > Mac OS X - Fine. FreeBSD - Fine. RedHat/CentOS - Fine. SuSE - Fine. Any sufficiently complex system, including every one of the above, has problems. They may differ from Debian's in type, nature and even quantity, but they exist. Including missing commands, disabled functionality, and misconfiguration.
regularfry 16y ago
As far as I'm concerned, having rubygems available at all in Debian is a bug. Gems should be repackaged as .debs.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  This. The point of Gems and Maven and the CPAN client and all this other crap is to smuggle code into a production box while carelessly failing to get it into the platform's database of what's installed where and what depends on it. They replace one tool that knows everything that's going on, with many tools each of which can't. Somehow we got stuck with a critical mass of small-scale developers who never faced the nightmare of somehow keeping the right tarballs on hundreds of machines in different roles without good tools, so now we all get to relive it.
  - cemerick 16y ago
    That's hilarious. Users of Maven and CPAN represent a "critical mass of small-scale developers"? Holy shit. A similar idea was voiced a few days ago, specifically regarding Java libraries (http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/the-real-problem-with-java-in-linux-distros/ http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/the-real-problem-with...). My response remains the same: Debian (or what-have-you) is but one distro among many, and those of us that treat such things as important but fundamentally commodity deployment platforms have no wish to spend our lives babysitting whatever package manager happens to be on the operating system we're using that month/year/whatever. Further, plenty of people have plenty of good reasons for deploying on Windows and OS X, so using tools that work well there make sense. The priorities of the various linux distros aren't everyone else's priorities – which somehow seems to come as a galloping shock to some.
    - billswift 16y ago
      That is why I use Slackware. Installing new software by hand from tarballs is a bit tedious compared to package managers, but it is transparent, and when I am done I can be pretty sure it is going to work. I have tried other distros, even Debian once (for some reason the Debian wouldn't let me sign in as root, I never did figure out why), but I keep coming back to Slackware - for its transparency.
papaf 16y ago
Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer? 1. Its the polite thing to do. 2. The bug can be tracked and commented on. 3. The bug is more likely to be fixed. 4. Thats how most open source projects work. I've not used Homebrew on the Mac, but it does look like an promising alternative approach. If you don't like something, you can fork the distro, fix the bug and put in a pull request yourself.
rbanffy 16y ago
> Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer? I think you really should go to debian.org and demand they return your money.
- heresy 16y ago
  I'd rather they return the youth during which I was a Debian maintainer.

by heresy 16y ago

davidw 16y ago

> Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer? Because he cares about the bug being fixed, rather than just whining? The point is to focus on fixing the system, not on pointing fingers or telling eachother to fuck off. The maintainer most likely already had the ruby-ssl package, and so the 'cursory test' worked for him. Look, I don't think the rubygems package on Debian is a fantastic bit of work, but ultimately: It's free software. If you don't like it, either help fix it or don't use it. Point it out if you like, but don't be such a dick about it.

heresy 16y ago
It's clear we disagree. The author put something out there under a free license, Debian benefits by including it in the distribution. There is no onus on the author whatsoever. People bitch because it's always Debian from which these problems originate. Mac OS X - Fine. FreeBSD - Fine. RedHat/CentOS - Fine. SuSE - Fine. Debian - Commands missing, functionality disabled, misconfigured.
- davidw 16y ago
  The author put mongrel out there under a free license, as well as some unnamed gem, and various other things. The gem is not included in Debian. As to the "benefits" of Debian including anything, they certainly aren't pecuniary, but accrue mostly to the end users (or not, in this case). So, if you help Debian fix something, the beneficiaries are ultimately all the users of Debian, not really 'Debian' itself. > Mac OS X - Fine. FreeBSD - Fine. RedHat/CentOS - Fine. SuSE - Fine. Any sufficiently complex system, including every one of the above, has problems. They may differ from Debian's in type, nature and even quantity, but they exist. Including missing commands, disabled functionality, and misconfiguration.

regularfry 16y ago

As far as I'm concerned, having rubygems available at all in Debian is a bug. Gems should be repackaged as .debs.

prodigal_erik 16y ago
This. The point of Gems and Maven and the CPAN client and all this other crap is to smuggle code into a production box while carelessly failing to get it into the platform's database of what's installed where and what depends on it. They replace one tool that knows everything that's going on, with many tools each of which can't. Somehow we got stuck with a critical mass of small-scale developers who never faced the nightmare of somehow keeping the right tarballs on hundreds of machines in different roles without good tools, so now we all get to relive it.
- cemerick 16y ago
  That's hilarious. Users of Maven and CPAN represent a "critical mass of small-scale developers"? Holy shit. A similar idea was voiced a few days ago, specifically regarding Java libraries (http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/the-real-problem-with-java-in-linux-distros/ http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/the-real-problem-with...). My response remains the same: Debian (or what-have-you) is but one distro among many, and those of us that treat such things as important but fundamentally commodity deployment platforms have no wish to spend our lives babysitting whatever package manager happens to be on the operating system we're using that month/year/whatever. Further, plenty of people have plenty of good reasons for deploying on Windows and OS X, so using tools that work well there make sense. The priorities of the various linux distros aren't everyone else's priorities – which somehow seems to come as a galloping shock to some.
  - billswift 16y ago
    That is why I use Slackware. Installing new software by hand from tarballs is a bit tedious compared to package managers, but it is transparent, and when I am done I can be pretty sure it is going to work. I have tried other distros, even Debian once (for some reason the Debian wouldn't let me sign in as root, I never did figure out why), but I keep coming back to Slackware - for its transparency.

papaf 16y ago

Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer? 1. Its the polite thing to do. 2. The bug can be tracked and commented on. 3. The bug is more likely to be fixed. 4. Thats how most open source projects work. I've not used Homebrew on the Mac, but it does look like an promising alternative approach. If you don't like something, you can fork the distro, fix the bug and put in a pull request yourself.

rbanffy 16y ago

> Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer? I think you really should go to debian.org and demand they return your money.

heresy 16y ago
I'd rather they return the youth during which I was a Debian maintainer.