On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Glenn Little <[email protected]> wrote: > We're going to be doing some system administration types of tasks on > linux servers, and I'm looking into the pros and cons of using ruby > vs. perl for this. > > First off, the main concerns are programmer efficiency and ease of > maintenance. The runtime speed differences between ruby and perl are > much less of an issue. > > I have done ruby programming and do enjoy its expressive elegance. > I've seen some perl and it seems, er, less so. > > On the other hand, doing some initial looking around, it seems that > CPAN (and just the larger experience/usage base in general) might be > advantages over ruby and gems. Whether or not that's true, and > whether or not that makes up for the cleanliness of ruby is one of the > things I'm wondering. > > I'd love to hear the thoughts of anyone who has tried to do sysadmin > types of scripting, account creation, interfacing with the OS, etc > with perl and ruby and can offer any insights. > > We need to stick with standard, supported rpms, so it looks like > that's currently 1.8.5 on centOS and perhaps 1.8.7 on Ubuntu. > > Thanks for any thoughts! > > -glenn
I switched to using ruby for almost all my non-bash/zsh scripting over 7 years ago and have never had problems. Today its amazingly easy to find a library that does what you need it to do. I still have ruby 1.6 on some one OS X servers that make it a little challenging, but it's still my language of choice. As far a system integration goes, I tend to do a lot of exec or ` calls in the scripts for things like account creation or service restarts. The IO stuff in 1.8 and higher has basically allowed me to keep all file manipulation in ruby. The CPAN vs rubygems argument will almost always fall way into the rubygems camp for me.. have you actually tried to install something like RequestTracker using CPAN? *cry*. My advice, if your code ruby, then use ruby. Mark Turner :: [email protected] :: @amerine -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
