[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] Ruby directory clean up proposal.

[Peter Lewis]

On Monday 13 Feb 2012 20:47:01 Thomas Dziedzic wrote:
> >> /etc/gemrc - contains "gem: --user-install" to install user installed
> >> gems with gem to $HOME/.gem/gems
> > 
> > I didn't know about --user-install, but I just set GEM_HOME (actually, I
> > use RVM). Can what you want be done by globally setting GEM_HOME to be
> > based off of $HOME? Or is --user-install the preferred way?
> 
> I did look into $GEM_HOME but I thought this was inadequate since
> running sudo gem install foo would still install foo to the
> system-wide gem directory. Having --user-install in /etc/gemrc forces
> it to install to /root/.gem/gems instead.

Great, I should have read up on --user-install then. Sounds great.


> > And as much as I have to admit that I'd really like to be able to install
> > gems system-wide and use their built-in dependency management, bundler
> > etc... I think that road probably leads to madness and death, especially
> > when many popular gems will still be managed by pacman (and rightly so).
> > So, I would be careful about doing this, and would suggest that we go for
> > only letting 'gem' install things under $HOME. Anything that should go
> > system-wide should have a PKGBUILD.
> 
> Right, by default I want it so that you wont be able to install system
> wide gems with gem.
> But I can't stop users removing --user-install from the gemrc file and
> installing to the system-wide directories.

Perhaps we have an argument for proposing an option like --user-install that 
doesn't allow users to disable it then.

 
> I have another plan brewing in regard to letting users separately
> install pacman installed gems and gem installed gems to the
> system-wide directory.
> I wont do it in this cleanup iteration, but next cleanup, I will add a
> /var/lib/gems or /var/lib/ruby/gems folder specifically so that when
> running sudo gem install without --user-install, it will install to
> /var/lib/.. and gems installed via pacman will install to
> /usr/lib/ruby/gems. This will cleanly seperate pacman installed ruby
> gems to /usr and sudo-gem without --user-install installed gems to
> /var. This will bring ruby and rubygems into fhs compliance, at least
> afaik :)

Nice. Just out of interest, what RUBYLIB order precedence would you use, to 
deal with the case when some similar things (say different versions of the 
same gem) were installed in /usr/lib/ruby and /var/lib/gems at the same time?


> Doing this will require modifying the GEM_PATH and all PKGBUILDs that
> install ruby gems. This wont break the PKGBUILDs just make them
> uncompliant with our standards, instead it will just install to /var
> if you don't change them which will be in GEM_PATH. BTW, GEM_PATH is
> the location where rubygems searchs for gems.
>
> I have already talked with upstream rubygems devs and they seem to
> agree that this is a good plan :)

> I'm certain I will go with 1 this cleanup and will implement the above
> on the next cleanup.

All great.


> > Of course, suggesting RVM for user-installed gems(ets) is probably also a
> > good idea.
> 
> For rails development, I can't recommend rvm enough, you can manage
> multiple gemsets with multiple ruby versions, and have it
> automatically load project specific .rvmrc files when you cd into
> those directories.
> This is probably one of the nicest language management tools for a
> programming language I have encountered so I would recommend it :)
 
> Ofc, rvm might be overkill if you're just doing development on small
> projects, or if you just don't need a clean separation of multiple
> ruby environments.

Agreed. It really is a breeze to use. I don't do much rails, but just use 
clean gemsets along with bundler, most of the time. It helps with predicting 
what's going to happen when I want to run the code on another machine.



> > PS. A while ago I was getting very frustrated that the version of rubygems
> > bundled with ruby itself was so out-of-date so quickly, but 'gem update
> >  --system' is a very bad idea in combination with pacman. So, I spent a
> > while hacking together this package, which installs the latest version of
> > rubygems itself alongside ruby, system-wide:
> > 
> > https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=50346
> > 
> > It's hacky, but it works :-) I wish there was a cleaner way.
> 
> I was also thinking about this, and I might split rubygems off into a
> seperate package and have ruby optdepend or depend on it so I can
> update the package separately from ruby.

Hell yeah. Please do. I assume you're aware of this:

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17611

Pete.