[arch-general] Ruby gem packages in Arch

[geralt at gmail.com]

>On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Maxime Gauduin <alucryd at gmail.com> wrote:

>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.

Rubygems, as well as well as bundler, RVM and the rest of the Ruby
ecosystem, use folders under $HOME by default (unless installing with sudo,
which is not really necessary). There should be no pollution of
pacman-managed dirs.

I also think pacman packages for ruby gems, or even the Ruby interpreter
itself, are wasted effort. The ruby community generally considers using
system-managed gems and interpreters a bad practice; they get slower
updates, it's hard to keep multiple versions installed in parallel,
different users share the same set of gems which is not always desirable...
I'm sure fixing all those in pacman packages is possible but it would be
costly, and why do that work when there are tools in the Ruby ecosystem
that already solve the problem in a platform-independent way?

It seems to me like a case of "when you have a hammer, all problems look
like nails". In this case pacman is not the best suited tool, rubygems and
bundler and RVM and friends are. Just my 2 cents.
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