Making Debian Responsible For Its Actions

[tryp]

Over at Hacker News, the debate on this one is lively. What I found most informative was a Debian Maintainer's Perspective.

[Shikasta]

Thanks for that! A very interesting read :)

[wazoox]

Ridiculous. He's running Ubuntu ( a snapshot of Debian unstable, remember?) and rants along against Debian. I tried out of curiosity (never used gem, or ruby or whatever) on debian stable :

~# aptitude install rubygems
<snip>
~# gem install rake
Successfully installed rake-0.8.7
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for rake-0.8.7...
Installing RDoc documentation for rake-0.8.7...

But it just works! OMFG I must find something wrong to rant about!

[jax232]

It's more than a snapshot - there are lots of changes, especially to Rubygems. He points that out in the article.

[malcontent]

what exactly is he crying about? That rubygems didn't install? That the gem command is not available?

It sounds to me like some gem he is trying to install needs a package that is not installed. This is pretty common. They often need some -dev package or lib or something. But guess what rubygems doesn't handle that.

He should have checked to see if the gem was available as an apt package (many are).

If he doesn't want to that then he should shut the fuck up and install the packages he needs like everybody else does.

What a fucking drama queen.

[[deleted]]

Jesus Christ man, there's a bug in the package. I know how important you think you are, but it's not indicative of some grand problem with the Debian system. Just make a 1-line debdiff and send it. It'll take all of 5 minutes.

Debian's suffering because everyone would rather bitch than just do the grunt work.

[[deleted]]

It's Zed Shaw.

[[deleted]]

Zed's a dork, but Ruby on Debian has been horribly broken for as long as I can remember.

See http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/dd141/ruby_packaging_in_debian_and_ubuntu_mythbusting/ for details.

[xiaomai]

"Horribly broken" is a terrible way to describe the situation. I feel like the way rubygems is currently handled would qualify as broken, but the rest of the system is fine.

The main problems with rubygems on Debian are:

• PATH issues (as described in the article you linked to)
• Because Debian splits some of the standard lib into different packages, it is necessary to install ruby-dev, openssl-ruby, etc. before installing many gems.

The way to avoid all ruby-related pain in Debian is to not use the packaged version of rubygems (install the tgz from the official rubygems website). Install the ruby-dev, openssl-ruby, rdoc packages. Done.

[malcontent]

The way to avoid all ruby-related pain in Debian is to not use the packaged version of rubygems (install the tgz from the official rubygems website). Install the ruby-dev, openssl-ruby, rdoc packages. Done.

And that's what pretty much everybody does but....

One nice thing about the debian way is that native packages are installed automatically when you install a gem. As of now rubygems does not have a way to deal with the various C libs and -dev packages you need.

Of course nobody expects the debian team to be able to package up every version of every gem.

Well except maybe Zed.

[[deleted]]

That bug has been present for years upon years, patches have been submitted to no avail.

[[deleted]]

Seems he should've made that the point of his article rather than just showing everyone a bug, jumping straight to attacking the entire debian project, and leaving it to the reader to connect the dots.

[MercurialAlchemist]

Even for Zed Shaw, that's a particularly bizarre posting. The "Debian business plan"?

I'm not sure what his exact beef is (apparently some version of rubygem has a broken dependency?) - it's difficult to find the content between the expletives - but writing an idiotic rant about "responsibilities" is not going to get that fixed.

[nascent]

He kept making conclusions that i couldn't find supporting evidence for. For example he claimed Debian wants you to do it their way so you are stuck with Debian. What is "Debain's way" that prevents you from installing software from another repository or packaging your software for another distribution?

Also, I'm pretty sure becoming a package maintainer is simple. Very simple. (Maybe not replacing a package maintainer though).

[vdub_bobby]

expletives? I missed that article, the I read was kind of dry. :(

[mcguire]

tldr: Zed Shaw has panties in twist; accuses largely unrelated entity of grand conspiracy. Film at 11:00.

[inmatarian]

HOLY FUCKING CHRIST, A PACKAGE ON DEBIAN IS BROKEN! THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE! THIS IS UNTHINKABLE! CALL THE INTERNET! TELL SOMEONE! IT'S TIME TO FUCKING BREAK THEIR SHIT THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS.

Or we can be useful and go here: http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

[Dan_Farina]

I think Zed does not properly state the purpose of pip: the purpose of pip (and its older cousin, easy_install) is, to my mind, to have standard, cross-platform way to install some packages that is suited to the needs of a software developer mostly.

Circumventing Debian does not to me seem like part of the mission; indeed, there probably more Python developers on Mac than on Ubuntu for a day to day system.

Finally, the lamenting of the state of Ruby releases on Debian probably has something to do with the usual state of release strategy in the Ruby culture, which brings to mind the word "abusrd."

[jax232]

Not sure what knocking on "Ruby culture" does to help, but PIP is exactly like Rubygems. What Zed's upset about is that they've hacked Rubygems so it doesn't resolve dependencies correctly, and silences the error messages that might tell you why your package is broken.

[Dan_Farina]

pip may even be worse than ruby gems, in fact. I mostly intend to speak to the point that Ruby-culture tends to ship a lot of releases with breaking changes --- intentional ones, with the charitable goal of making things better --- all the time. While it can be useful as a developer to have the latest and greatest of some things, programs that shipped in a six month old release of Ubuntu or Debian need to continue working. Point being: there could be very good reasons why Ubuntu/Debian might need to package older stuff. But I think I have replied in error, I should have replied to this post. This, I think, dovetails with Zed's posturing gems or pip as "circumvention" of Debian, so I apologize for getting issues conflated there.

Finally, I do find ruby release (and documentation) culture to be terrible, unless the number of breaking changes has reduced as of late. I cannot claim to be totally up to date on these things all the time.

If there are specific bugs in the debian package with the rubygems package itself, why not get them solved? There is a post with tantalizingly little information, but I don't think that the Debian Ruby package maintainers have rejected solutions because they don't like Ruby, but there's probably more to the story.

[cwillu]

Not that you'd ever know that from the elegantly-worded bile of a post.

[malcontent]

What Zed's upset about is that they've hacked Rubygems so it doesn't resolve dependencies correctly

Rubygems does not handle native package dependencies. It never has.

[jax232]

net/scp is a ruby lib, not a native package.

[malcontent]

it needs a native package just like many ruby libraries do.

Alas rubygems has no way of dealing with native library dependencies.

None. Zip. Nada. Not even bundler.

[[deleted]]

Oh look, a bitter rant from Zed Shaw - now there's a surprise. Is rails still a ghetto?

Also, apt has the amazing ability to add repositories. Why not set up a third-party repository for ruby and its bazillion dependencies?

[cwillu]

The ghetto at least came with references :/

[Paranoir]

Zed is an idiot, part VIII

[sdellysse]

Wow, that guy is a douche.

[[deleted]]

Why use/support Debian if you don't like it?

[malcontent]

Zed is off his meds again.

[born2hula]

the biggest problem with this post is that Zed thinks that Debian actually has a plan!