Debian: coexistence of debs and gems?

  • Thread starter Michael Schuerig
  • Start date
M

Michael Schuerig

I'm using Debian/Linux and have come upon tough rock while digging for
rubies. Debian, like most Linux distos, manages installed software with
a package management system. Ruby as well as several libs including
Rails, in particular, are available as packages. That's great as it is.
Nevertheless, of course there are libs that are not available as debian
packages, but are available as gems.

Installing RubyGems is quick and easy, but from there on, I'm stuck with
two problems:

* Files from gems are installed below /usr where they get intermixed
with files from regular debian packages. I'd much prefer gems being
installed below /usr/local.

* RubyGems does its own dependency management and is ignorant of
anything installed as debian packages. As an effect, when I try to
install a gem that depends on Rails, RubyGems wants to install the
Rails gem, even though Rails is already installed.

Is there a way to make these to package managers play nicely?

Michael
 
F

Friday

Michael said:
I'm using Debian/Linux and have come upon tough rock while digging for
rubies. Debian, like most Linux distos, manages installed software with
a package management system. Ruby as well as several libs including
Rails, in particular, are available as packages. That's great as it is.
Nevertheless, of course there are libs that are not available as debian
packages, but are available as gems.

Installing RubyGems is quick and easy, but from there on, I'm stuck with
two problems:

* Files from gems are installed below /usr where they get intermixed
with files from regular debian packages. I'd much prefer gems being
installed below /usr/local.

* RubyGems does its own dependency management and is ignorant of
anything installed as debian packages. As an effect, when I try to
install a gem that depends on Rails, RubyGems wants to install the
Rails gem, even though Rails is already installed.

Is there a way to make these to package managers play nicely?

Michael

I'm also grappling with this issue. For now, I'm using gems when the
corresponding Debian package does not exist. As ruby grows more
popular, I'm sure this strategy will rear its ugly head.

Maybe the best solution is to have a new tool that wraps both gems and
the OS's package manager. This will allow gems to grow while ignoring
the complexities of supporting apt, yum, etc. And it will allow the
wrapper to add support for package managers other than apt.
 
L

Luke Graham

I'm also grappling with this issue. For now, I'm using gems when the
corresponding Debian package does not exist. As ruby grows more
popular, I'm sure this strategy will rear its ugly head.

Maybe the best solution is to have a new tool that wraps both gems and
the OS's package manager. This will allow gems to grow while ignoring
the complexities of supporting apt, yum, etc. And it will allow the
wrapper to add support for package managers other than apt.

I have not used Debian, but Gentoo packages could simply wrap gems, so
that when a package is installed, ruby-gems is used to grab the files,
and effectively both systems know about the package being installed.
Its much better than using yet another tool. Of course, this means that
all interaction with gems would be through portage. It should be possible
to auto-update the list of gems that portage knows about too, maybe
another little script could do that. A simpler way would be to just distribute
the ebuilds for each gem.
 
P

Paul van Tilburg

Installing RubyGems is quick and easy, but from there on, I'm stuck with
two problems:

* Files from gems are installed below /usr where they get intermixed
with files from regular debian packages. I'd much prefer gems being
installed below /usr/local.

A libgems-ruby/rubygems package is currently in preparation (by Daigo
Woriwaki) and I am checking it out for uploading/sponsoring it.
There are however some outstanding issues (see your point below).
See also:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-ruby/2005/01/msg00017.html
* RubyGems does its own dependency management and is ignorant of
anything installed as debian packages. As an effect, when I try to
install a gem that depends on Rails, RubyGems wants to install the
Rails gem, even though Rails is already installed.

This has been discussed on the Debian Ruby list before,
please refer to:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-ruby/2005/02/msg00009.html
Is there a way to make these to package managers play nicely?

The conclusion is, is that it is very hard, but there might be a
solution out there.

Greetings,

Paul
[/QUOTE]
 
M

Michael Schuerig

Paul said:
Debian Ruby list

Thanks for pointing me to this list. I assumed there might exist one,
but never made sure. Now I know and subscribed.

Re dpkg/gems: as there's obviously work being done on it already, I'll
be happy to see what becomes of it.

Michael
 

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