[BioRuby] Ruby installation

[Pjotr Prins]

On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 01:16:14AM +0100, Iain Barnett wrote:
> I don't understand this fascination with GUIX. What does it get me
> that the other 70 build tools don't have? Each one has its own
> sweetspot, and none of them have "won" the battle, which suggests
> this is an incredibly hard problem.

Many initiatives basically confirm people realise we have a problem
and people try to fix it. Not each project has its sweetspot. Each one
has its own NIH - and probably came up with a inferior 'solution',
including rubygems. Rubygems worked well for a while. I would say it
is broken now. 

Tick boxes for a good package manager:

[ ] sane dependency handling
[ ] transaction based installs
[ ] unlimited multi-version support (say 8 rubies)
[ ] binary installs
[ ] local caching
[ ] distribution/OS independent
[ ] both root and $HOME support
[ ] shared software installs by users

and the main one for me (both as a scientist and system adminstration
guy)

[ ] guaranteed replication of dependency software tree

You and I can probably think of a few more. You can see rvm solves a
few of these, but not all. It is pretty rediculous that we have such a
complex beast for Ruby alone - we would be better off using a decent 
package manager that is shared with, for example, Python.

I agree there is an evolution going on which may end up with multiple
species of solutions (in addition to the existing ones), some better
than others. I am happy to ask you pick another one and come up with a
useful installation procedure. The more we have of those, the more
likely we end up with a good one.

I choose GUIX because I am acquainted with the deeper internals of
Nix/GUIX. They have been going for some time now. If you really want
to know I invite you to read the documentation rather than simply
blast at other people's ideas. I *will*, however, take the effort to
reply to real (technical) questions.

You know, other people still blast me today for using either Ruby or
Linux, and I am still very happy I made those fundamental choices over
ten years ago. I really am.

I wrote an article about Nix in 2008:

  http://archive09.linux.com/feature/155922

I wrote an article about Ruby in 2002:

  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5915

I bet you weren't using Ruby then. I predict GUIX is going to be good
for us, feel free to *prove* me different. FOSS is about evolution.

> Most of all, until everyone on this list moves to
> http://semver.org/Â for versioning, this is a moot point for me
> anyway. There's no point talking about build tools until you've
> fixed your version numbers.

OK. It is not a bad idea, though it is only necessary for package
managers that actually rely on those (which is a rather terrible
idea).

Pj.

PS I think we should move this discussion to the SciRuby list. There
are some receptive people there.