[damm]

Gems are the most confusing thing to new Ruby users.

Example that most people on HN will likely get, but most people in real life will ask you why? They have a point you should pay attention to.

If you read most ruby books you'll get one of two patterns.

1. Install brew 2. Install libyaml in brew 3. Install rvm 4. Install ruby in rvm linked to libyaml 5. gem install x and if you need y... just get another gem that supports it.

One of the core problems I've seen is most people do not grasp that a 'gem' is a package. After looking over some of the gems published to Rubygems they quickly realize the quality differs and they are at their own mercy.

Now ask yourself, why would anyone who wants their product to be (useful|used) condone this?

Basically it's a slippery slope, I understand both sides of the coin and I don't know what to say shrug

[npsimons]

I'll be perfectly honest, as a Debian user/admin, I've never really saw the point of Gems. They just seem like Yet Another NIH unnecessary package format.

[fennecfoxen]

This is the classic operating-system package management/programming-language library packaging dichotomy. You see the same conflict of philosophies with Perl and CPAN packages versus Red Hat / CentOS .rpms of the same package.

Sysadmins frequently seem to like the operating-system approach. Developers frequently seem to like the programming-language approach.

[prodigal_erik]

I think this is because most developers haven't (yet) been paged at 3 AM to discover that everything is fucked because a handful of critical servers somehow still have bugs in libraries that were already fixed. I'm a developer and I think language-specific package ghettos are a pretty crazy way to handle deployment to production. Any dependency I can't express in the same way as all the others (namely my platform's one and only package manager) is a ticking bomb.

[lucaspiller]

So on the latest version of Ubuntu (12.10), if I run "apt-get install rails" I get Rails 2.3. That was originally released over 4 years ago. There have been (nearly) 4 major releases since then. How do you work around that, or do you not?

[fennecfoxen]

One way to work around that is to host an internal apt/yum/etc repository and put whatever you need into a package there.

[andyl]

A nice way to build apt repositories is to use fpm. https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

Although for just installing rails, using rubygems is the way to go, IMHO.

[npsimons]

More honesty, my original composition was a bit more inflammatory, but I do (sort of) understand where the urge to package comes from. I've been someone who's pulled things quickly together, whether it be through CPAN or the incredibly convoluted checkout-build scripts of ROS (http://ros.org), and yes, very often I will clone and build things from GitHub, cause dangit, it's not packaged yet.

But I've come also from the dependency hell that was GNOME on RedHat over a decade ago, and I just love the fact that I can almost always type "apt-get install $name_of_new_toy" and be playing with it in under five minutes, all without having to worry about breaking other packages or strewing files god-knows-where, or having multiple, redundant, possibly bug and security hole ridden copies of dependencies, and knowing that I can deploy it instantly on my web server. Windows and OSX also don't figure very much into my worldview, so I don't really care much that they need bolted on package managers to fix their brokenness.

[mattmanser]

brokenness

Seriously, why even bother posting? Your view and your original question is totally worthless as it turns out you're an OS-bigot. We work in a world of logic peppered by pockets of irrational fan-boys. Is it fear of the unknown that drives you to such extreme statements?

You would do much better if you just reviled them all equally as I do. Windows is shit. Macs are shit. Linux is shit. All programming languages are shit. Though I profess a special hatred for javaschipt. That's built its own little corner of hell. Computers are items of vast wasted potential covered in liberal amounts of poorly implemented shit.

And the best we can do for the next 50 years is mine it and clear it gradually away as we uncover the occasional nugget of gold in festering piles of, well, you know what.

[nona]

I mostly agree, except for the ability to install multiple versions of the same gem or package at the same time.

[mattmanser]

RubyGems works cross-platform?

[nona]

Things like nix do too. Even apt-get used to work on MacOSX (fink).

[Blackavar]

As long as you're on a *nix, yes. RubyGems works cross-platform, not just cross-POSIX.