The Coast is Clear to Vocally Praise RubyGems #
For awhile, the Ruby packaging playing field was utterly undecided. Can you imagine that just summer-before-last your only real option was to use raa-install, which was great, but sort of depended on the right install scripts and proper URLs in the RAA. It was a cool hack, thankyou Patrick May.
RubyGems is excellent and has been a huge boost to the proliferation of libraries. It’s features are impressive. Here is what I mean.
Getting library versions with introspection. I’m not sure why loaded_specs is hidden.
require 'rubygems' require 'builder' class << Gem; attr_accessor :loaded_specs; end Gem.loaded_specs['builder'].version # Other metadata, of course... Gem.loaded_specs['builder'].description
Serving up all your system’s gems. And documentation for all of them, which we love already. But if you want to check your remote machines to see what’s installed…
On the server: gem_server.
On the client: gem list -r --source http://that.machine:8808.
Searching gems. I have a tendency to pipe the gem list through grep when I’m searching. Here are commands for gem’s own built-in search.
Short: gem q -r -n webdav.
Or completely: gem query --remote --name-matches webdav.
MrCode
The guys have definitely done a bang-up job, and I couldn’t have asked for a better group to bring my old dream alive.
One of these days I’ll even try to contribute something, hehehe.
MrCode (aka Ryan Leavengood, aka the Guy Who Was Sort of Forgotten When He Stopped Work on the Original RubyGems)
Testamonies
Mrs. Charles McClusky of Peoria, Ill. says: “RubyGems has changed my life! I’ve lost 20lbs and I look 10 years younger. The only thing I can’t figure out is why I keep craving Japanese food – I never had Sushi before this. Pass the uni please!”
Mr. Clyde Sanderson of Milwaukie Wisc. writes: “Thank you for RubyGems! I’m catching more bass than I ever could’of imagined! My wife is even going to let me buy a new boat!! Hey, but one question: Why do all the ducks out there in the pond seem to have little horses climbing on their backs?”
Welll, maybe Mr. Sanderson has had a little too much RubyGems. Remember RubyGems are powerful!
RubyGems! Snakes don’t like them! Watch what happens when our non-RubyGems-using friend jumps into this snake pit – Ugghhh!! not pretty. Now watch what happens when this smart fellow jumps in the snake pit with RubyGems™; they don’t bite, they don’t even lite!
RubyGems™: Available without a perscription. (not available to Pythons; Oyster eaters and Java drinkers may need some time to adjust to RubyGems. )
riffraff
IMO rapt worked great too.. Btw, I’m still keeping the hope that the rubygems guys can change #require_gem to #use or something else. Quick, before the 1.0 come!
Tsela
Actually, I’d rather have that gems be indistinguishable from normal packages, and just use “require” like others (without having to require “rubygems” either). End applications shouldn’t have to know about the package manager. They shouldn’t have to know about whether a package they depend on has been installed through Rubygems, by hand or through a third-party distribution mechanism like apt.
As long as Rubygems is not transparent to me as a programmer, I’m afraid I’ll have to do without.
Vagabond
Yeah, the require_gem thing is a bit annoying, you can do a workaround by rescuing an exception (as outlined in pickaxe2). Pickaxe2 also claims that as of rubygems 0.7.0 it generates ‘stubs’ to make require work normally, but that doesn’t seem to work on my system.
trans
They got rid of stubs. You can not set the ENV var RUBYOPT to allow require to automatically search the gems.
In part I agree with Tsela. But versioning is a good thing, and I suspect there’s no way to have both worlds—some file sysmes don’t have linking. So it’s either this or stubs.
Why were stubs given up?
jason
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve had nothing but pain from gems. I’ve tried to install rails several times with it, and always got mysterious and unhelpful errors that nobody could explain. Meh.
Vagabond
If you need versioning (and you KNOW the lib was installed via gems), there’s no reason you can’t use the current method of require_gem. However I think if you don’t care about versioning, or can’t gurantee gems is managing the lib, that you should be able to ‘require’ it, regardless of how it was installed.
I don’t think you’d need to use symlinks for stubs, couldn’t you use a ruby file that added the gems lib path to the search path, and then required it. You’d just need to change the search path depending on the version of the lib you’re making a stub for… Tho, what do I know? :)
glogg
What, my current method of olfactory praise isn’t good enough?
riffraff
require_gem and require can’t be actually mixed since the former does not really load a file like the latter does. That’s why I’d love to see the name changed, it does basically a very different thing then “requiring”.
timsuth
Hurrah for rubygems!
Matz says:The time has come.
chad
Thank you, Why and everyone!
Some answers to the questions raised:
netghost
Rubygems is an excellent package management system. The one place I’ve had trouble with it has been with native extensions though. I know this isn’t ruby gems’ fault, but it’s still an issue. Any ideas on what it would take to make it easier to install some packages in Windows?
Don’t worry I use OSX whenever possible, but folks I work for like Windows since they believe they can administrate it ;)
Aredridel
Too bad it still doesn’t play with dpkg, pacman or rpm.
I loathe the thought of having to use two separate package managers to maintain my server cluster rather than one. With 13,000 packages available in RPM , and a few hundred in gems, the choice is clear.
rue
Hey, this is like watching Fox News’ debates.
redshift
I really appreciate the central aspect of gems, and how easy they are to create/distribute, but my problems are thus:
1) The command line syntax just seems awful to me. Not like any other familiar program, switches required when they shouldn’t be, long syntax, etc.
2) It doesn’t play well with package managers. I use gentoo, and when a package is available through portage and a gem, I choose portage. It knows my system better. So I lose out on gems’ consistency, can’t follow procedures consistent with other people, and, of course, gems doesn’t know that I already have certain libraries installed.
3) I’m afraid Tsela is right, it’s not transparent enough. If/when it gets merged to Ruby officially, and if it can become totally transparent with require, it’ll be fantastic.
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