[arch-general] Ruby gem packages in Arch

[Maxime Gauduin]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Paul Gideon Dann <pdgiddie at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Monday 13 Jan 2014 12:59:28 Maxime Gauduin 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
> 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