On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 11:51:28PM -0800, David MacMahon wrote: > Hi, Andrew, > > Thanks for your comments. Ideally I'd like somehow to support both a > Ruby-centric installation (i.e the .gem file) as well as non-Ruby- > centric installations (e.g. apt/yum/port/whatever). Alan's analysis > (showing that most people install plplot binaries via a package manager) > got me wondering about how most people install Ruby extensions. I've > always done it via the "gem" command, but I know MacPorts has a bunch of > rb-xyzzy "ports" that can be installed, so maybe people install Ruby > extensions that way more often than I imagine. To tell the truth, I > wouldn't be able to install a non-gem Ruby extension manually without > looking up how to do it! :-) > > One nice thing about the gem based install is that it is very easy for > non-admin users to install gems under their home directories so they need > not bother the admins with installing gems in system directories (but > they can if they want to, of course). I imagine most package managers > let non-admin users do that too, but I'd be surprised if it were so easy > as a non-admin gem based installation. > > How does Debian package up Ruby extensions? For example, is there a > "rails" package?
The (draft) ruby policy is at http://pkg-ruby.alioth.debian.org/ It looks like debian does package quite a few ruby modules for administrator convenience. There is a package rails for example. Certainly debian's package manager doesn't allow installation in non standard locations (except by unpacking the files by hand). It kind of defeats the object of packaging things up neatly for the distribution. I know nothing about ruby, so the above is just what I've gathered from looking at the debian archives and a quick google search! I'm not sure in this case that installing the ruby bindings into a home directory helps. You still need to install the plplot libraries. If you don't have administrator priviledges then this means compiling it yourself, so you might as well get the ruby bindings as part of the compilation. Andrew ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
