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No, he's arguing that asking somebody else to spend an hour of their time to install a gem is placing extra barriers to people experimenting with the software that came with their computer.

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Which is where he loses me. If that person wants to deal with gcc, they're not casual, and spending an hour grabbing latest libs and tools is how they roll, Xcode or no. Any time I'm on CPAN I end up updating 50 other things and 3 hours later wonder what I was looking for in the first place.

I think the point might have been that there are some more casual uses (homebrew, rubygems, python eggs, etc) that aren't as hardcore as writing c but that have gcc as a dependency.

Installing Xcode to get gcc was already a requirement before this. I really don't understand the argument.

Funnily enough, I've never heard anyone mention it before this whole ruckus, even though installing Xcode was a requirement to get gcc in the past. No one has taken the time to build it themselves with the source that Apple gives out for free and host it for those that don't want to install Xcode.

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