DebGem (beta), Ruby packages for Debian | Hacker News Reader

DebGem (beta), Ruby packages for Debian

debgem.com

19 pointstortilla10 comments

It is noteworthy that this was created by Phusion, the same people who created Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) and Ruby Enterprise Edition. Basically, a company that really enjoys solving high-profile problems related to Ruby. (First, Rails is a pain to deploy. Then, Ruby is a memory hog in web-application applications. Now, Debian hates RubyGems.) From my perspective, their work is high-quality, and increases my confidence in this 'product'.

This is clever technology and a well-known problem, but I wonder how much traction it will get since it's going to be a for-pay service.

I agree, this is a worthy cause, but you'll have to prise real cash out of a Debian user's cold dead hands ...

I personally wouldn't pay because I'd be surprised if there wasn't a similar community effort very soon, as there is for Python modules and Java classes.

Better for the company to market themselves with - create their own repo, but Open Source it and make sure their URL appear in every aptitude run.

How is this a "problem"? What is wrong with just regular rubygems?

From an Operations standpoint, having two conflicting package management systems is a huge headache. It's one more point of failure on production systems. The jpackage project was a similar effort which packaged oft-used Java libraries in RPM format.

Here is a thread (and related article) on HN about the problems with RubyGems: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386036

Here is the official position of the Debian/Ruby-Extras team: http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html

It has been a polarizing issue, as you can see.

Why use Debian stable at all? Because people trust Debian's rigorous test and release process. Now let's mix your rock-solid Debian system with an external paid-for service the community has no control over...

Interesting... I've been trying to build my servers lately with Ruby Enterprise Edition as the only ruby (a little tricky, since you need ruby to install REE) to avoid the confusion of multiple rubies with multiple rubygem installs.

I wonder how this would work with a ruby install other than the standard ubuntu ruby package.

In the long term we plan om providing an REE package which replaces the one provided by Debian. By then we'll also offer DebGem repositories with packages compiled against REE.

- Hongli Lai (Phusion)

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