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Comment by jasim | Hacker News Reader

> If I want to make a complex application run, chances are I'll need five gems to do it... and versioning is extremely important. I was following an application template that clearly spelled out all the gems and versions I would need to build it, but hit my first snarl when one gem wasn't quite prepared for Ubuntu 12.04...

Five gems? I haven't seen very many production Rails applications that can do with just five gems. More gems is mostly a good thing - each does just one thing, and does it well. It is like having more smaller methods instead of a few large methods.

> Are these gem heartburns a common problem in Ruby/Rails or is this mostly due to my ineptitude with the language?

Yes, gem heartburns can happen, but they are not very frequent. I'm sure the author will find that Bundler makes versioning an almost solved problem as he understands the language and ecosystem better. Good luck!

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I think the "understands the language and ecosystem better" is critical, but my expectation is that I need to learn a subset of key gems better more than anything else.

Every hardcore Ruby-ist that I've known has owned a Mac as their primary dev machine. I'm sure that there are plenty of Linux devs out there, but my experience has been that it's heavily Mac-driven. However, by sticking with Linux as my development platform, I'm probably going to learn the guts of gems because I have to get under the hood to make them work on Linux.

Maybe I'll continue to have gem conflicts, but that's okay - I'll know how to hack around them.

why so? Mac is a lot like Linux. I've been having little problems with the vast majority of mature gems even on Windows (especially with ruby devkit around, which automagically temporarily puts a GNU environment in my path to build gems that contain c/c++ code, none of which you'll need to worry about on Linux)

You will not run into this problem. Linux is almost always used for production servers and is popular for development as well.

While many Rubyists may use a Mac I'm confident the large majority deploy those applications on Linux. Cross OS compatibility issues are virtually non-existent, especially on non-development focused gems.

I've been developing on Linux since I started. If someone makes a gem that you can't install because you're using Linux, you probably don't need that gem :).

You shouldn't hit any issues with gems and linux -- most production Ruby systems use linux.

No, I agree with the OP. If you want to install some interesting Ruby app or library you quickly find yourself installing all sorts of interdependent gems to get it to work. This is, of course, a matter of YMMV, but I can see where he's coming from.

And with Python, BTW, it's a lot easier, probably because of all the batteries that are included.

Yes and no. A non trivial project will need multiple interdependent gems. But installing them simply is a matter of running 'bundle'.

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