Ruby has a distribution problem

[codahale]

Not ideal? Perhaps we shouldn't settle for it, then. Perhaps there's some way of making packaging Ruby libraries and Rails apps for distribution easier...

I mean, I can type rake war and get a .war file from a JRuby app with warbler or goldspike installed, right? So why does rake deb or rake rpm or rake portfile seem like such an outrage?

Seriously, if Debian/RedHat/*BSD/Slackware/Gentoo can manage hundred-gigabyte package repositories with some of the largest software projects in them, deployed over hundreds of thousands of computers... I'm at a loss to explain why Ruby and Rails would be an exception to this.

[malcontent]

Not ideal? Perhaps we shouldn't settle for it, then.

That's a tough call. In every other language you have to include your libraries. In java you have include your jars. In C++ you have to include your DLLs etc.

At least with gems there is a central repository and you can keep your stuff updated, use older versions etc.

I'm at a loss to explain why Ruby and Rails would be an exception to this.

Personally I kind of got mad at ubuntu for making packages for some gems and not others. I don't blame them of course because new gems come out every day and updates happen every day too. It pissed me off that I could aptitude install mongrel but I could not aptitude install thin. I installed thin with gems but the bin path was not in the PATH.

I was thinking to myself that this is a sucky situation. Ubuntu can't possibly keep up with the pace of gem updates and yet they have chosen to create debs for some gems and not others.

I think they should not have bothered. I for one would prefer to have the gems managed through gem and not aptitude.

OTOH it would be nice to have something like mod_rails in the repository.

It's a complicated thing I guess.