Hi all,

I'm planning on giving Ruby on Rails a spin. There's a slackbuild script available at Slackbuilds.org, for Ruby Gems, the package manager for Ruby libraries. Ruby on Rails is one of those libraries/extensions.

In light of this statement on Debian's position on Ruby extras, I'm wondering if anyone has had trouble with Ruby extras in Slackware.

I understand how Slackware packages work. I don't really know, beyond the general concept, how Debian packages work. I have no experience (yet) with Ruby, but the documentation doesn't seem to indicate potential problems.

Has anyone installed Ruby Gems in Slackware? How about Rails? If so, were there any problems I should look out for?

Thanks,

-Drew

Hello Lufbery,

I have installed Rails with Slackbuild's Gem package and I do not seem to have any problems as of yet. I have set up a working Rails application using Mysql and everything seems to work fine.

Naturally, the main problem with Rubygem is having two different packaging systems on one computer. This can potentially create dependency issues and problems with packaging systems overwriting and overlapping files of the other parallel packaging systems, just to name a few. But that doesn't mean it is impossible for more than one packaging system to coexist. It most probably depends on the packaging system at hand.

For example, Debian has a very tight file hierarchy and packaging system, so they usually are not very tolerant for other packaging systems to be used. There has been much heat between the Rubygem and Debian community.

Slackware, on the other hand, while it shares a very similar file structure as Debian (not exactly, but same FHS philosophy), has a lighter packaging system, so it seems the Slackware community generally does not make a fuss with rubygems. However, that is not to say that there no potential problems.

You can get somewhat around this problem by installing rubygems in an alternate location other than the base Slackware system hierarchy:
http://www.rubygems.org/read/chapter/3

Murdock

Murdock,

Thanks for the reply and the reassurance! I'll be installing and learning Ruby on Rails over the next few weeks. I'll post questions/progress here.

Regards,

-Drew

I haven't worked with ruby at all, but it seems to me that it is a perfect candiadte for installation under /opt. After all, /opt was created esepcially for programs which do not conform to normal directory hierarchy standards. /opt was created as a place where these programs can 'do their own thing' -especially with an eye towardss programs which install everything under one directory, per version. if what ruby wants is for all its' accessory packages to be installed under one main ruby directory, then that would be the same.
I would use something like --prefix=/opt/ruby-$VERSION in that case. Politics and standards aside, you can always do as you want when you do things yourself. As said, I haven't looked closely, but src2pkg may provide a convenient way to let ruby have its' own way, while still having the extras conveniently packaged and accounted for with pktools.

Hi Gilbert,

After a lot more reading, it looks like I'll probably be just fine installing Ruby Gems (the package manager for Ruby libraries) and then let Gems handle Ruby packages. If I want to remove stuff later, I'll remove the Ruby packages with Gems first, and then remove Gems itself with removepkg.

Ruby itself comes with Slackware. I've been playing with it and it seems pretty neat. I'm actually sort of torn between really digging into Lisp (or at least Emacs Lisp), or Ruby. I've also done some scripting with Python in the DTP application, Scribus. At least when working with a specific API for a specific application, Python seemed pretty straightforward.

Anyway, back to the topic: I can see the advantage of putting Gems in /opt, but in this case, I'm not sure it's necessary.

What I don't yet understand is which actions with Gems require one to be logged in as root. I suspect that most do because the libraries should (by default anyway) be available to all users on a system.

Regards,

-Drew

will try it too on slackware 64 13.1 , let you know more about ...

theget,

Were you able to install rails using gems? It seems I'm having issues.

I had no problems at all, though not being much of a ruby or rails expert I need some assistance to configure rails and sort gems dependencies, but none of those issues were specific to slackware (I'm on 13.1).

Egads! I'm surprised to see this thread come back up.

Rails seemed pretty cool when I played with it in 2008, but ultimately I gave up on it because the infrastructure wasn't in place for me. By infrastructure, I mean things like having a web host that handles Rails, etc.

Please keep posting your experiences with Ruby, Rails, and Slackware, though. It'll be neat to read about what others are doing, and I may just look at it again.

Regards,