On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Paul Gideon Dann <pdgiddie@gmail.com>wrote:
IMHO, the reason why you would choose to use rubygem over pacman depends of how extensive a ruby user you are. I like to have gems handled by pacman, but I only use a few of them and don't need to have several versions of
On Monday 13 Jan 2014 12:59:28 Maxime Gauduin wrote: the
same gem. Having them installed system-wise also makes them easily available to all users. That being said, you can achieve the same with rubygem by sharing a common ruby home between your users. As for the files not handled by pacman, home dirs are not referenced anyway so having gems in it really doesn't hurt.
For system-wide gems, I do "sudo gem install <gem>". That works because I've restored /etc/gemrc so that it reads simply "gem:", instead of "gem: --user-install". I'm still not clear on why this configuration file is altered in the Arch package. I think it's because there's a feeling that system-wide gems should be handled by pacman, which I personally find weird.
That is not a feeling, gemrc is removed on purpose so that you _don't_ run "sudo gem". Your whole system is managed by pacman except for some dirs, why wreak havok in it by using some other package manager? I'm exagerating on purpose, I know rubygem does its job well and there shouldn't be conflicts bewteen the two, but it just doesn't feel right.
I get that people may be afraid of using a second package manager, but Rubygems is incredibly easy to use, and handles gems much more effectively than can be achieved in pacman, because Rubygems is domain-specific. A quick command reference on the Ruby page on the Wiki should be enough.
Yes, gem is easy to use, so is pacman. You can achieve the same results with pacman-handled ruby packages given some effort on the maintainer's part (apart maybe for the, imho unneeded, complexity of having multiple versions of the same gem, but that is another story).
When you start doing Ruby development, you quickly come to rely on Bundler, which relies on Rubygems. Throwing Pacman into the mix would cause a big mess, at least until you learn to use rbenv or something similar.
Paul
As I mentioned above, you can easily reverse that statement. Why throw Bundler and Rubygems in the mix when you have pacman? I personally think that having pacman-managed dirs tinkered with by another package manager is heresy :P I have no problem using one in "~" or any other dir that pacman does not manage though, and as Rashif said, all in all it's just a matter of options and preferences. Cheers, -- Maxime