2011/3/18 Jesse Phillips <jessekphillip...@gmail.com>: > Russel Winder Wrote: >> At the expense of easy system administration. > Specifics? It allows for one packaging system across all operating systems. > This means you don't need to figure out how to package your source in RPM, > Deb, ipgk, arc, emerge, zip, or whatever else Linux has.
For the developer, yes. For the user, it just means that you have to learn N different packaging systems, which not uncommonly cause conflicts, for instance in language-bindings conflicting with "native" libraries. I know of at least one company that were quite serious about migrating their webapps from Java to Ruby/rails, but after a while cancelled due to just those packaging issues with gems creating weird conflicts and silent errors when bindings were complied slightly differently from the native C-lib. ---- For the record, their apps were designed for deployment on Ubuntu Server, which at the time had native support for almost all Java-related packages, but less wide support for Ruby. The situation have changed a little since then, and quite a lot of Ruby-packages are now in native Ubuntu.
