Comment 62 for bug 145267

FYI, I started a discussion on the Debian bug tracker: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=403407

I think Neil has an interesting idea about gradually integrating Rubygems with Debian. Debian Rubygems users would actually appreciate this. For example, IIRC Rails requires a sqlite3-ruby gem which needs the headers to compile. Much easier to just use the deb package for libsqlite3-ruby. As a farther-out prospect, an Ubuntu-specific Rubygems could intelligently install the sqlite3 package, detecting that the deb version matches what's required by the gem.

This raises the question of whether we should even have Rubygems. The reason we should say yes is that Rubygems is a cross-platform packaging system. Gems have to install on MacOS and Windows, and Ruby development is targeted to the gems. On those other systems it's necessary to install all the headers before installing the related gems (many of them are provided on the MacOS Developer CD). So Debian Rubygems could be a *better* Rubygems.

As Neil mentioned this couldn't happen immediately. I still wonder, though, whether the relevant paradigm isn't build tools, or even rm. Debian can't stop you from hosing your system as long as you can install from source. If files are installed into /usr/local at least the user can delete everything under /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/share to get back to a stable system.