On 28 November 2010 03:32, Mike Bailey <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 2:56 AM, Ben Hoskings <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I don't think there's a need, for those projects at least.
>>
>
> There's definitely a benefit to packaging when you maintain a large number
> of systems or want to provision cloud servers quickly.
>

Absolutely, but that's not something that any of us are dealing with as far
as I know (if "large" is dozens or more). Also it involves a lot of
compromises.


- rvm makes ruby builds so easy and consistent that packages aren't really
>> required (and you get lots of other advantages over a systemwide install);
>>
>
> How long does it take you to compile Ruby these days on a slice with 256 MB
> ram?
>

Not long, only about 5 minutes I think; but depending on the situation this
might be a concern.


- nginx has to be rebuilt to change passenger or other module versions, so
>> packaging it isn't practical.
>>
>
> How is this a problem?
>

It makes things messy because nginx builds against the version of passenger
that was installed via (the active) rubygems. If you're distributing a
binary nginx package, you'd also have to ship the corresponding passenger
build, which isn't really feasible because it expects to be `gem install`ed.

I'm sure it's possible to fudge the gem install, etc, so it can be
distributed as a self-contained package, and there are probably situations
where that's a good idea. But in general, it's simply not worth it when you
can automate the build so easily (passenger comes with a tool to do it
pretty easily, it's a one-liner with babushka (and other tools), etc etc).

IMO, nginx just wasn't designed to be put in a binary package :)

Ben

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