[arch-general] Ruby gem packages in Arch

[Paul Gideon Dann]

On Monday 13 Jan 2014 13:17:13 Magnus Therning wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 11:45 AM, Simon Hanna <simon.hanna at jesus.de> wrote:
> > Since ruby allready comes with a package manager (mentioned earlier), I
> > never downloaded anything from the aur, but used rubygems instead. My
> > question is, if we really need to have all these packages in the aur.
> > Isn't
> > it easier to manage everything with rubygems??
> 
> As someone who doesn't develop in Ruby at all, is it really true that
> ruby comes with a package manager (as defined here:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_management_system)?  In
> particular, does it support
>   1. removal of packages
>   2. non-ruby dependencies

* Yes, Rubygems is a package manager.
* It is geared toward packaging ruby code and binary extensions.
* It can remove packages entirely or clean out all but the latest version.
* It can not handle non-ruby dependencies, except for those that can be compiled into a 
native ruby extension, which becomes part of the installed gem.
* It wouldn't be a good choice for a language other than ruby.  It is really quite domain-
specific.

Paul