CentOS - Oct 2011 - Installing Ruby gems on RPM-based systems

When I first got involved with Red Hat (back with 5.2 in the early 90's) I 
learned the hard way not to use language-specific packaging systems like 
CPAN for Perl because they'd conflict with RPM's database and make it
much
harder to manage what was installed on my system. If I now need a package 
for which no RPM is available, I'll use a utility like cpanspec to 
repackage it into an RPM and install that.

Now I'm starting to work with Ruby and apparently it has its own packages 
called "gems". How do people deal with making Ruby and RPM get along?

I'm trying to build Diaspora, an open source alternative to Facebook, and 
it wants me to install a ton of gems. I'm working on a
"disposable" machine
that I can re-image at will, so I let it use Ruby's "bundle
install"
command to dump all the gems from the Ruby repositories into their system 
location. But in a "real" installation I'd want to do this with
RPM,
repackaging gems as needed. What's available to do this properly?

<https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Installing-and-Running-Diaspora>

--On Saturday, October 08, 2011 4:56 AM -0700 Kenneth Porter 
<shiva at sewingwitch.com> wrote:
> How do people deal with making Ruby and RPM get along?
No sooner do I hit the send button than I realize how to frame the question 
to Google and find the answer. For the list archives:

<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Ruby>

On Sat, 2011-10-08 at 03:56 -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> When I first got involved with Red Hat (back with 5.2 in the early
90's) I
> learned the hard way not to use language-specific packaging systems like 
> CPAN for Perl because they'd conflict with RPM's database and make
it much
> harder to manage what was installed on my system. If I now need a package 
> for which no RPM is available, I'll use a utility like cpanspec to 
> repackage it into an RPM and install that.
> 
> Now I'm starting to work with Ruby and apparently it has its own
packages
> called "gems". How do people deal with making Ruby and RPM get
along?
> 
> I'm trying to build Diaspora, an open source alternative to Facebook,
and
> it wants me to install a ton of gems. I'm working on a
"disposable" machine
> that I can re-image at will, so I let it use Ruby's "bundle
install"
> command to dump all the gems from the Ruby repositories into their system 
> location. But in a "real" installation I'd want to do this
with RPM,
> repackaging gems as needed. What's available to do this properly?
> 
>
<https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Installing-and-Running-Diaspora>
----
CentOS 6 is new so there's little experience with running ruby packages
on it but there's really no problem with running 'gem install
$SOME_PACKAGE' on any system. Realistically, the available rpm packages
are never going to keep up with the gems so after you get the base ruby
rpm packages installed (ruby/ruby-irb/ruby-ri/ruby-rdoc/ruby-gems) you
should probably just quit there and use the built-in gem package
provider to do everything else. Also, if you are talking about something
like a Ruby on Rails solution, the more organized setups will use
'bundler' to get the application up to speed rather quickly.

Some people use RVM (ruby virtual manager which will allow you to have
multiple versions of ruby on the same computer). This pretty much steps
outside of the native rpm packaging completely.

CentOS 5.x however is a different beast and the ruby implementation is
1.8.5-X which is too old to do much of anything and I've found the
simplest thing to do is not use any CentOS ruby packages whatsoever and
simply use 'Enterprise ruby'

Craig


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