Ruby on Rails 6.0 Slated For Fedora 33

[Brane215]

Ruby and rails are both very widely used and even growing. The distro packaged libraries and gems are useless though.

Which makes it unuseable for mere mortals ?
I have constant headaches woth ruby on gentoo, without obvious reason why is it even used.
Too many dependencies and incompatible versions for code snippets, that could have been easily written in r Rust.( or C/C++).

I can understand why e.g. Freecad depends on opencascade or vtk. Those are two big libraries that one needs in CAD program of such nature.
Why have they went with Python and its bazillion dependencies is beyond me.
Same with ruby and other crowds ( haskell etc).

Why on earth would one write something that is to be generically used in such language, is beyond me.

[Chewi]

I would consider using the system Ruby if it wasn't too old but it depends on the context. I mostly work with Docker now, where I just use the upstream Passenger image.

As I have said, gems as packages may make sense for end-user applications where the user doesn't care what language it was written in but there aren't very many of those for Ruby. sup springs to mind.

[existensil]

Ruby and rails are both very widely used and even growing. The distro packaged libraries and gems are useless though. I'm a full time ruby dev and I've worked at many shops, and no one has ever even considered using distro packages for either development or deployment.

Ruby devs use things like chruby/rbenv/rvm/asdf/etc to manage multiple ruby versions at once, which are run as the user and either compiled from source or download pre-compiled binaries. On the rare occasion I use my system ruby I only ever install the base package and use `sudo gem install pry` to install something like pry instead of apt/rpm.

Virtually every single ruby project has it's dependencies managed by bundler, so, agian, distro packages are useless, and bundler works easier when run non-root, so system ruby is out anyways. The packages aren't relevant to deployments either.

I don't really understand why any gem-as-package packages exist. Ruby already includes the `gem` command and an expansive stdlib, so bootstrapping from there is straightfoward and where all the docs point you. Is reliance on the language's own package system for extensibility really a danger to distro users? Who is the audience for these?

[Brane215]

Sometimes languages see a resurgence but I don't expect that Ruby will ever displace Python now. It had its chance but as its popularity grew, people realised it didn't scale very well and walked away. The performance has improved a lot since then but it's still behind most similar languages. I sometimes have to work with Python. I find it horribly inconsistent in places but it gets the job done. My heart belongs to Rust now though. I had to write a command-line tool that connected to a HTTP API recently and it was a joyous experience.

Fine. I can't see any role for these things past duct-tape one shot things.
Perhaps Python/Ruby would be ideal replacement for bash. That is, if they managed to agree upon some "golden" long term version that could be used for such purpose.
Otherwise, I can't remember one project, done in python, worth of public use and with solid machine useage.
That aside, many are constant support headache etc.

Finally, looking at the things that they are used on, one often can't evade the question why haven't this been done in C or, if one wants to be modern and "safe", Rust.

[Chewi]

Sometimes languages see a resurgence but I don't expect that Ruby will ever displace Python now. It had its chance but as its popularity grew, people realised it didn't scale very well and walked away. The performance has improved a lot since then but it's still behind most similar languages. I sometimes have to work with Python. I find it horribly inconsistent in places but it gets the job done. My heart belongs to Rust now though. I had to write a command-line tool that connected to a HTTP API recently and it was a joyous experience.

[Brane215]

Where is Ruby compared to Python these days WRT to actual useage ?
It seems to me that the Python is prevailing in segment of interpreted languages that are not bound to VM ( as Javascript etc)...

[Chewi]

I'm not familiar with those libraries but at least in PHP's case, there are more popular end-user applications. I maintain phpBB and TT-RSS, for instance, although they do not have any dependencies beyond PHP itself.

[royce]

Debian also package symfony, laravel, a whole host of php libs you'd normally install via composer (php's dependency manager) and the same goes for node and a ton of random libs you'd normally install via npm/yarn.

Python too, but I do understand it as so much system tooling is written in python.

[Chewi]

What about packaging it for rolling release distros like Arch or Void? They are very fast to package updates.

Gentoo is my distribution and yes, our Rails package is up to date for the same reason, but I doubt I could say that about all our Ruby packages. Almost every Rails project will likely pull in some relatively obscure gem that is either outdated or isn't packaged at all. If you have to rely on RubyGems for even one gem then what's the point? What do you gain from using packages in this context anyway? You can't build Ruby code with optimisations. Most gems with native code will build from source and honour CFLAGS anyway. One of Gentoo's best features is USE flags but they're not that useful here either.

[Vistaus]

As a (formerly full-time) Ruby developer, I find it odd that distros package this at all. Although it somewhat frustrates me as a distro developer myself, even I wouldn't use a distro package when developing a Ruby application. Even Fedora moves too slowly to keep up with the ecosystem and the tooling isn't designed to work this way either so the distro just ends up getting in the way. The only reason why you might want it as a package is for other end-user packages that require it. In this case, there's only Redmine. It's still developed but it's never been particularly popular.

What about packaging it for rolling release distros like Arch or Void? They are very fast to package updates.