On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 09:21:08PM +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote: > Marc Haber <mh+debian-devel <at> zugschlus.de> writes: > > > In my past experience it is the usual case where and upstream and/or > > its community takes at as a personal offense when a user is not using > > the latest and greatest software version[1] and does not understand > > I think the Ruby case involved more: > > “What, you’re not running version x of the dependency y but a newer > one? Ignore the fact that version x is vulnerable, because that’s > the one you *must* be using for my code! Ah, and no, the dependency > of package z of version x+1 of package y is not a problem, because > with out cool package manager you can install them in parallel!”
That was a bit of both issue, but that happens in pretty much every language community out there. I just tried installing some cool thing in Perl, and installing it from CPAN into $HOME blew up because of incompatibilities with some Perl package installed via dpkg, and could only test the said package when I tried installing it from CPAN in a clean chroot. There is always impedance mismatch between those who want to build stable, dependable, predictable systems and those who want to live in the bleeding edge, and as said elsewhere in this thread, that's not exclusive to the Ruby people. IMO the noise caused by "the Ruby situation" was amplified by the concurrent development of two different of factors: - a lot of leading (and very vocal) Ruby developers were using a system that had no proper package management (MacOS X), so they didn't care enough to understand the requirements "from our side". But the Ruby packages in Debian implemented those requirements. - that also happened during the boom of Ruby development outside of Japan -- skyrocketed by the boom of Rails -- where everything was new and everyone was experimenting like crazy. That led to the lack-of-stables-API and let's-break-our-reverse-dependencies bandwagons. Today, the situation is improving from our side, if not by discussing the relationship, at least by writing the proper code. With Rubygems moving into the core -- what makes sense, because we cannot fight against the fact that several users of the language won't have proper package managers provided by their OS, we had to deal with it. As a sort of technology preview, in Wheezy one will be able to have Rubygems detect dpkg-installed packages¹. ¹ http://packages.debian.org/rubygems-integration Also, switching the default Ruby version on a per-user/pre-project² or even on a per-system² basis was made easier. ² http://packages.debian.org/rbenv ³ update-alternatives --config ruby From the Ruby community side the situation is a lot better. You will even see the occasional "don't you break a stable API" rant within the Ruby community. -- Antonio Terceiro <terce...@debian.org>
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