Brandorr wrote: > On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 6:51 AM, Amanda Waite <Amanda.Waite at sun.com> wrote: > > > I am in favor of gems for everything, with no OS level packaging at > this point. The reasons I believe this are: > 1) Ruby and Ruby on Rails are evolving too rapidly to keep up. (It > will be a constant game of catch up.) > 2) Gems have pretty much become the defacto way of managing > extensions. So much so in fact that ruby-gems will be merged with ruby > soon. (v1.9) > 3) If we were to use OS packaging, we have the choice of using > non-standard paths, or putting ourselves at risk for inconsistent > package metadata. (If os packages are just bundling gems). Depending > on how people go about installing gems and os packages. > 4) Gems supports having a choice of installing various extension > versions. (Or even multiple versions) This is an important feature, as > interface stability is still not the highest priority among extension > developers, so having the choice to run tested and potentially older > versions is still very needed. OS packaging might have a difficulty > with this, as typically the only choice is to install the latest > package. > > Note: > 1) Running "gem install Rake" isn't a big deal. I'd say if someone is > going to be running ruby, known how to use rake, it is extremely > unlikely they won't know how to install rake. > > Cheers, > Brian > > It was the points you made on an earlier thread (http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=196547𯿃) that convinced me that there were some circumstances where it would be necessary to provide a package install of Rails I'm very much an advocate of doing things "the ruby way" and I really feel that if we give it enough thought we can come up with a way of providing a Solaris package that will install the Rails Gem along with it's dependent Gems and not cause us problems with future package updates. In my view, the only alternative to this is to do what you suggest and not package Rails, just leave it to the user to "gem install rails".
Amanda
