Proposed F19 Feature: JRuby 1.7 - JRuby is an alternative Ruby implementation

[Mo Morsi]

On 01/24/2013 11:07 AM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Bohuslav Kabrda (bkabrda at redhat.com) said: 
>> JRuby and Ruby won't share extensions. Extensions for Ruby will live in %{_libdir}/gems/ruby, while extensions for JRuby will in %{_datadir}/gems/jruby (although we decided not to actually ship any JRuby extension Gems for F19 as we want to take more time to figure out the guidelines specifics around it).
>> JRuby is pretty incompatible with C extensions. In fact, guys from upstream told me that they may even completely drop support for C extensions, as its very hard to maintain and doesn't really bring significant benefits. That's why we don't want to do it in Fedora.
> So, thinking of this in terms of python (sorry, that's my experience), this
> is the equivalent of an alternate python interpreter that can only use
> .noarch python extensions/modules that don't depend on any archful python
> modules?
>
> How is an application author supposed to know which interpreter they can
> use - do they have to recursively traverse their dependency stack first
> before making a decision?
>
> Bill
>

Most popular gems w/ native extensions support the big interpreters,
namely MRI (the official ruby) and JRuby. AFAIK the other smaller
interpreters offer compliance w/ at least one of these.

Yes it is true that there are gems that do not offer support for both,
but it isn't too common. There used to be a site isitjruby.com that
served as a community driven knowledge base for jruby-compatability, but
it no longer exists.

IMO this is a great selling point for Fedora to the upstream Ruby
development community, use our Ruby stack and things will "just work"
(tm). The value we offer to upstream ruby via the Fedora stack can be
seen at http://isitfedoraruby.com

  -Mo