Recently I decided to learn more Ruby, not wanting an unclean system and being somebody who ultimately loves Debian because I can shape my system how I want, even with apt packages, and not knowing anything about Ruby I opted to learn from Debian by installing the Debian managed ruby1.9.1. Plus I learned along the way that Debian is the best when it comes to operating system maintained Ruby.
At first I was frustrated to learn that Gems came with the ruby1.9.1 package (I do not know why I was frustrated) because even the rails site says you should not use gems from Debian (I did not and still do not understand why, unless it has to do with update time. Which does not matter to me.) After my frustration ended I learned that Gems is kind of integrated into ruby now so I should stop listening to old suggestions and find ways to integrate my mission for Ruby and Debian mission to make Ruby the best it could be on Debian. After I installed ruby1.9.1 package and got ruby1.9.2 I looked at everything that was installed, I viewed it all, learned where it went there, and why it was chosen. Then the mission started, why were certain things not showing up? Was it my fault? Did I fail? No, it turns out that some parts were missing from the default install, and this might not be Debian's fault. What do I mean by 'why were certain things missing'? Well I mean rake and rdoc did not show up when I did 'gem list --local' and when I installed passenger, it broke rake for me :(. So there my mission started. I learned how gems were installed on my system, and found some tricks that I hope can be integrated into Debian ruby package to improve it, here they are: 1.) Include a GemSpec and create the initial Gem path before a user manually initiates a gem install: I spent the better part of today learning more about GemSpecs and how gems are installed by example; directly from rake. I installed rake and broke my ruby install and then learned that I could make gem recognise the Debian maintained rake by adding my own gemspec: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/525014/ 2.) Configure the GemSpec to fit Debian needs: After I built my intial GemSpec by hand, I learned that some parts were incorrect. So I then went on a mission to make that GemSpec work with Debian. Including getting (later generated Rdoc and RI files) to install in /usr/share/doc/rake1.9.1. 3.) Work with Upstream to improve gem handling for maintainer based gems such as rdoc and rake: The idea is that we should work closer with upstream to try and get them to improve the ability to lock certain gems. For example adding the options: s.update = "no", s.uninstall = "no", s.update_minor = "yes". This is so that users can't break their Debian maintained Ruby install, or companies like Engine Yard can lock gems to certain versions for stability, or anybody for that matter. 4.) Use /etc/default/gem for REALLY_GEM_UPDATE_SYSTEM and (if they get implemented) REALLY_GEM_UPDATE_DEBIAN_GEMS. I hope to hear back about what you guys think on these ideas. There is a lot more that I can come up with, but this is what I thought would really improve Ruby on Debian and it certainly made management of Ruby on my systems much cleaner for me. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
