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I don't know that I particularly disagree with you. The one advantage that a language scoped packaging system has over a system-wide system is developer adopti
by Locke 18y ago
I don't know that I particularly disagree with you. The one advantage that a language scoped packaging system has over a system-wide system is developer adoption.
Debian, Gentoo, Redhat, FreeBSD, etc all depend on heavily on volunteers to create the packages, manage dependencies, issue security announcements, feed bug reports and patches upstream to developers, etc. I've used Gentoo for a long time and I've watched it struggle in recent years as it loses volunteers. New releases take longer to reach portage, some software never finds its way to portage at all, and I find more and more broken packages. The only Ruby package I install from portage is Ruby itself.
The thing is, every Ruby developer uses RubyGems. There are no volunteers because the developers themselves create the packages for each release. I think this is more sustainable, even if I don't think RubyGems is as good as the packaging tools used by the major distributions.
- e1ven 18y agoThat's a really great point, and one I hadn't considered. Of course, in a fantasy ideal world, the way things would work is that the Ruby developers would create their own repository for .debs.. This would mean that if I want the latest and greatest files, I can add their repository to my existing package system, and everything integrates. When I did an "apt-get upgrade" it would check the Ruby repository, and upgrade all my ruby packages, too.. Then, when a package had proven itself to be stable enough, it could be copied back into the standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories, so that everyone could have it, even if they didn't add the repositories. Of course, in the real world, that would be far to much work for the Ruby developers, and would require that they customize for one specific OS.. But a man can dream, can't he? ;)