Let me weigh in as a developer who makes his living writing ruby programs, and is also, incidentally, a big fan of APT (though I don't have any visibility into the subtleties of the various package management system.)
I'm not a huge fan of rubygems. I'd even go so far as to say that I don't really like them. They suck. Given my preference for APT over rubygems, I have tried intermittently tried to use debian packages to manage dependencies on external ruby libraries, but this has *never* worked in the long run. In every single non-trivial project in the last 5 years I have grudgingly had to revert back to rubygems again, and again. The reasons are the same as Joseph already mentioned: 1) rubygems move more quickly than the OS packages, and are often I cannot afford to be 1 or more versions behind 2) Often, there isn't a debian package available *at all*, and so rubygems is the only option available other than installing from source. And that's the rub. Unless you can guarantee 100% equivalence, then people will always fall back on rubygems. 95% doesn't cut it, because then for all the edge-cases (and there are always edge-cases) you have to use a second package management system, and so you might as well be using it the whole time. I might add that every single one of the 10,000 rails tutorials on the internet begins with: sudo gem install rails rails /path/to/rails/app That worked on 8.4, but it is broken on 8.10beta(along with every other rubygem) and that's a *very* serious regression. Let me be perfectly clear: I don't like rubygems. If I can avoid it, I will. If there were a reasonable solution using APT I would prefer it, but I do not believe that will ever happen. As such, rubygems should work as expected on Ubuntu. -- rubygems bin in PATH potentially breaks other applications and violates all sense of decency in packaging. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/262063 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
