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Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

'gem install' hasn't worked flawlessly in my experience (on both Windows and Linux). It's more likely than not that I'll have a gem fail to install on me due to some dependency or configuration issue. It's consistent and frustrating enough where I shy away from Ruby now.

I like Ruby more than Python as a language, but I will say that I've never had pip fail to install a dependency on me.

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A lot of Ruby libraries just happen to use native extensions that rely on OS-packaged libraries being installed.

I'm surprised there isn't any part of the gem process that calls `pkg-config`, to verify if a gem will be able to install, given its native dependencies. Having `bundle install` bail out after just a second with "please install libfoo first" would be great, especially for CI.

> I've never had pip fail to install a dependency on me

`pip install` has never failed me, but `pip install --upgrade` fails for me quite a bit. Especially when I try to use it like `gem upgrade`, with a stanza like

    pip list --outdated --format=legacy | cut -d' ' -f1 | xargs pip install --upgrade

Maybe because `pkg-config` is mostly a GNU/Linux thing?

pkg-config works on windows with visual studio as well.

What about IBM i, z/OS, ClearPath, INTEGRITY OS, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, Aix, ..... ?

The problematic parts of gem/pip install are....the C parts.

And if they were installed from a gem how long do you think it would take for security patches to be applied for every install? Image magick is a popular gem plugin on look at the vulnerabilities:

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1749...

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