Ruby has a distribution problem

Submitted by gwolf on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 16:30.

I usually don't like me too comments... But this is something that really disappoints me of my otherwise-favorite development framework. I must echo Matt Palmer's comment on Luke Kanies' entry:
Ruby. Has. A. Distribution. Problem.
Nice, good read. Sadly, many Rails pushers see distributability as something very minor, something that should not worry Rails developers right now, as there is too much other serious work to be done - Better UTF8, a clearer language, better performance... And besides, any programmer can live well with gems. (yes, that's all taken from a rant I had with a very convinced person)
My gripe is that... Rails is no longer a small, fringe project. Rails is an enterprise-grade development framework, with thousands of deployed production systems. And if they don't start to act responsably, if the Rails developers keep pushing said problems as low-priority, the Rails developers' (that is, their users) culture will become rigid - and will constitute a serious harm to Rails' future.
Distributability and packageability is not only for OS distributors. Not only we Debian zealots care about software being easily packageable. By using Ruby Gems, you dramatically increase entropy and harm your systems' security.
Read Luke's text for more details. It is quite worth the time.

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distribution problems...

Submitted by Almost Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 05/10/2008 - 17:05.

has Ruby a distribution problem? THE WORLD has a distribution problem. more than one, of course. the development opportunities maybe is the more important, but there are some others....

I agree with you. However...

Submitted by gwolf on Mon, 05/12/2008 - 03:12.

You know this saying, think globally, act locally. I am involved with Perl and Ruby. The Perl community is great to work with, they have a great infrastructure, and mostly value stability over new features, long-term support and full documentation. And... Well, I'm trying to convince some Ruby people, bit by bit, that the same is required in their community. Ruby is a really great language... But severly lacking in this regard.

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