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Comment by shimonamit | Hacker News Reader

Matz compiles. He doesn't use Debian's packaging.

He most certainly uses Debian's packaging for any dependencies he may need.

Or do you think he also compiles stuff like Readline, IConv, Zlib, OpenSSL? Or stuff related to Ruby gems, like postgresql-server-8.4, in case he needs ruby-pg ?

On other platforms even installing GCC is a painful process, when on Debian/Ubuntu is as easy as:

      sudo aptitude install build-essential

And why would he need to compile his own Ruby for stuff unrelated to developing the Ruby interpreter? Are you telling me that if he needs to do some quick processing on some machine he absolutely needs HEAD?

The backdrop on this topic is the recent news of Debian's Ruby package maintainer quitting, mostly due to issues he has with the Ruby core community and the maintenance/release process.

This post by Matz was supposedly submitted to debunk the myth that "Ruby's not for Debian", but it is entirely orthogonal to the issue at hand. Matz undoubtedly compiles his Ruby, as most maintainers would do with their projects, rather than install using Debian's package manager.

If you look at the topic of the thread, it's to a user. The ruby-talk mailing list is for general discussion, and the title of the thread is "Best Linux Distro for Ruby?"

This is where I make two points:

1: I just replied to your sibling, and

2: So do most Debian Rubyists. Through rvm. ;)

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