On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Paul Gideon Dann <pdgiddie@xxxxxxxxx>wrote: > On Monday 13 Jan 2014 12:59:28 Maxime Gauduin wrote: > > IMHO, the reason why you would choose to use rubygem over pacman depends > of > > how extensive a ruby user you are. I like to have gems handled by pacman, > > but I only use a few of them and don't need to have several versions of > the > > same gem. Having them installed system-wise also makes them easily > > available to all users. That being said, you can achieve the same with > > rubygem by sharing a common ruby home between your users. As for the > files > > not handled by pacman, home dirs are not referenced anyway so having gems > > in it really doesn't hurt. > > For system-wide gems, I do "sudo gem install <gem>". That works because > I've restored > /etc/gemrc so that it reads simply "gem:", instead of "gem: > --user-install". I'm still not clear > on why this configuration file is altered in the Arch package. I think > it's because there's a > feeling that system-wide gems should be handled by pacman, which I > personally find weird. > > That is not a feeling, gemrc is removed on purpose so that you _don't_ run "sudo gem". Your whole system is managed by pacman except for some dirs, why wreak havok in it by using some other package manager? I'm exagerating on purpose, I know rubygem does its job well and there shouldn't be conflicts bewteen the two, but it just doesn't feel right. > I get that people may be afraid of using a second package manager, but > Rubygems is > incredibly easy to use, and handles gems much more effectively than can be > achieved in > pacman, because Rubygems is domain-specific. A quick command reference on > the Ruby > page on the Wiki should be enough. Yes, gem is easy to use, so is pacman. You can achieve the same results with pacman-handled ruby packages given some effort on the maintainer's part (apart maybe for the, imho unneeded, complexity of having multiple versions of the same gem, but that is another story). > When you start doing Ruby development, you quickly come to rely on > Bundler, which relies > on Rubygems. Throwing Pacman into the mix would cause a big mess, at > least until you > learn to use rbenv or something similar. > > Paul > As I mentioned above, you can easily reverse that statement. Why throw Bundler and Rubygems in the mix when you have pacman? I personally think that having pacman-managed dirs tinkered with by another package manager is heresy :P I have no problem using one in "~" or any other dir that pacman does not manage though, and as Rashif said, all in all it's just a matter of options and preferences. Cheers, -- Maxime
