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I suggested that rubygems.org and bundler were major improvements to the ruby packaging ecosystem that were driven by Rails. I'm not sure you actually disagreed

I suggested that rubygems.org and bundler were major improvements to the ruby packaging ecosystem that were driven by Rails. I'm not sure you actually disagreed with that point... Rubygems.org was not driven by Rails. It doesn't offer much beyond what rubyforge was doing. Less, actually. RF was for code hosting, docs, and gem serving. Once people started moving to github RF lost favor. When Github decided to stop serving gems rubygems.org came about to fill the gap. It lists and serves gesm; code and docs live elsewhere. Bundler, sure, came form the Rails community to apparently solve a problem for that community. It's not for everyone, though. I don't use it (doesn't make life any better for me), but then I don't use Rails either. There's lots that goes in Ruby that has nothing to do with Rails and the conflation of Rails and Ruby is a detriment to different Ruby communities out there.

sanderjd 13y ago
I still don't think that you actually disagree that the github/rubygems.org setup is an improvement over the rubyforge setup. Assuming that, I agree that the extent to which Rails had anything to do with that is debatable (and unanswerable, in fact); there was definitely an explosion of gems hosted on github that needed a new home, and I think the popularity of Rails had something to do with that explosion, but it certainly may have happened anyway. I think lots of people find Bundler to be an improvement over straight rubygems outside of Rails projects (even if you don't), which I think fits the criteria of "an improvement driven by Rails". I think your last sentence is the real argument you're trying to make here, and I agree with it wholeheartedly - it's incredibly frustrating that so many people seem to think Ruby is only good or useful because of Rails. I'm not one of those people!

sanderjd 13y ago

I still don't think that you actually disagree that the github/rubygems.org setup is an improvement over the rubyforge setup. Assuming that, I agree that the extent to which Rails had anything to do with that is debatable (and unanswerable, in fact); there was definitely an explosion of gems hosted on github that needed a new home, and I think the popularity of Rails had something to do with that explosion, but it certainly may have happened anyway. I think lots of people find Bundler to be an improvement over straight rubygems outside of Rails projects (even if you don't), which I think fits the criteria of "an improvement driven by Rails". I think your last sentence is the real argument you're trying to make here, and I agree with it wholeheartedly - it's incredibly frustrating that so many people seem to think Ruby is only good or useful because of Rails. I'm not one of those people!