Brandorr wrote: > On 10/1/07, Prashant Srinivasan <Prashant.Srinivasan at sun.com> wrote: > >> Thanks much for the comments. >> >> Debian, and FreeBSD seem to have their own "ports" of ruby gems. It's >> not clear if these packages will can be detected by rubygems. With >> Fedora, Ruby and gems are available through yum. And rails is installed >> through gems.(Fedora also packages some libraries as rpms rather than >> gems, such as sqlite.) >> >> For Nevada, I think we should support gem based install irrespective of >> whether we pre-bundle certain libraries, since users will need that to >> work(we cant possibly provide our ports to all the gems out there). >> >> On the issue of distributing software(rails, or mongrel etc). We have >> the following options: >> >> 1-> wrap Solaris packaging around "gem install --local" (problem: gem >> uninstall is not bound to pkgrm, and this can leave things in an >> inconsistent state). >> 2-> Create Solaris package versions of certain gems. Investigate what >> should be done for interoperability with gems(or decide to ignore >> interoperability with gems). >> 3-> Provide pre-installed gems with with the Ruby package(wont scale >> with time). >> 4-> Don't bundle them for now, since they're quite easy to install, and >> investigate #2. >> > > #4 vote here. (I would however that instead of strictly investigating > #2, we move towards a verification process that tests for clean > installation of the top 30+ gems, using "gem install", and only resort > to option two in the event that a "gem install" can't happen cleanly.) >
I'd have a concern with #4. We've heard the opinion expressed multiple times that in emerging markets, like parts of China and India, not including something with the OS distribution can be a major barrier to adoption. We may be able to ignore this 'for now', but can't really leave it alone very long. There are Is it possible to strike a balance by recommending regular gem install, but including a package that bundles common gems and an install script? This obviously isn't ideal and we'd need to think through patching. From my perspective, we need to both include common gems and somehow support using the regular network repository gem install. In conversation, I've also heard Jason Hoffman of Joyent agree with Brandon on the idea that the preferred way to install things like rails is as a gem, so there seems to be convergence on that idea. Prashant/Jyri: is there a good way to balance all of these? - Matt -- Matt Ingenthron - Web Infrastructure Solutions Architect Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Global Systems Practice http://blogs.sun.com/mingenthron/ email: matt.ingenthron at sun.com Phone: 310-242-6439
