RE: [Fxruby-users] [Q] Alternatives to the source RubyGem format?

[Oliver S. <ol...@mo...>]

> I'm guessing that the RubyGems developers' argument would be that they
> intentionally don't give you a choice for the installation directory. That
> is, Gems are always installed in a standard location in the Ruby directory
> structure so that you don't have to *care* where they were
> installed. I can
> see a parallel with how I use RPMs under Linux; I rarely list
> their contents
> to see what files are going where, I just install the RPM and
> know that it's
> going to be installed in the "right place."

I don't really need to know where the library files go, but the Windows
installer gives me some text telling me where example files and help files
are.  With the gem, I might not even think to look for any example files,
given that they are kind of buried in the c:\ruby directory.  Admittedly,
installing to another directory is not all that useful for a library, but be
prepared for users complaining that they have two ruby versions installed.
:)

> by "installing third party
> programs", are you referring to the requirement of first
> installing RubyGems
> itself? That is certainly a drawback for now, but at the last Ruby
> conference Matz expressed a strong interest in getting this into the
> official Ruby code base as soon as it's mature. I doubt that will
> be in time
> for the pending 1.8.2 release, but I wouldn't be surprised to see
> it make it
> in there by the end of the year.

Yeah, a few of my problems would be made easier just by rubygems being the
standard way of doing things.

> Now that you've brought it
> up, I'm wondering how hard it would be to in fact "wrap" a binary gem as a
> Win32 installer-like executable (and create an uninstaller for it
> as well).
> If done right one could still retain the advantages of RubyGems
> in terms of
> packaging and versioning, but lose the unfriendliness of the command-line
> interface.

I had considered this possibility as well.  Wrapping a gem in NSIS would
make me happy, and would also give the developer an option of installing
start menu folders, desktop icons, quick launch icons, registry keys and the
rest.  It would make me even happier if there was an automatic option to
reformat Linux text files in DOS format.  One of my pet peeves is
downloading some ruby source and seeing a 'README' file formatted with Linux
line endings.  Windows users can't double-click on a file with no extension,
and furthermore notepad won't display it correctly.  Not that FXRuby suffers
from that problem. :)

Oliver