Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Josef Stribny]

On 09/12/2015 12:41 AM, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson wrote:
>
>
> On 09/11/2015 09:09 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
>> What does Fedora users gain with "dnf
>> install rails" or "dnf install ipython" versus "gem install rails" 
>> and "pip
>> install ipython"?
>
> This indeed is very good question.
>
> I'm not sure how things are elsewhere in the world but in the case of 
> gem's on a rock in the middle of the north atlantic ocean , everybody 
> is using bundler with nobody wanting to go back to non existing or not 
> current gem's in distributions and or having to manually chase down 
> components and resolve their dependency's.
>
> They prefer spending that time actually hacking or drinking beer or both.
>
> JBG
I would argue that the most valuable thing apart from the security 
tracking is that you can properly specify _all_ dependencies the gem 
actually have. This is a big one for at least few reasons:

1, end-users don't have to go read README to know what to install so 
that the software actually starts working
2, avoids compilation errors due to the missing header files or conflicts
3, installation is faster and more predictable

If someone has a problem with installing a gem, he/she can install 
rubygem-* package on Fedora and it's done (they can easily combine them 
with upstream gems). It's also quite nice that a beginner can just dnf 
install some framework if he just want to quickly try/evalute it, but 
does not want to spend afternoon hunting installation issues. This seems 
less relevant for experience people, e.g. I know how to fix problems 
with Ruby, but when I need to do a little of Python work I prefer to 
install Fedora packages rather than trying to make pip work for me.

But generally there are other (small) things as well...you don't need to 
install any junk like -devel packages on your system, you can track all 
your software with rpm/dnf (e.g. you can rollback a transaction), the 
gem can come with man pages, etc.

p.s. they are however disadvantages as well

Josef