The Buckblog

This has got to be the most Ruby-unfriendly Linux distro on the planet… Here are 34 reasons, enumerated, why I will never use Debian:

1. irb1.8
2. libbigdecimal-ruby1.8
3. libcurses-ruby1.8
4. libdbm-ruby1.8
5. libdl-ruby1.8
6. libdrb-ruby1.8
7. liberb-ruby1.8
8. libgdbm-ruby1.8
9. libiconv-ruby1.8
10. libopenssl-ruby1.8
11. libpty-ruby1.8
12. libracc-runtime-ruby1.8
13. libreadline-ruby1.8
14. librexml-ruby1.8
15. libruby1.8
16. libruby1.8-dbg
17. libsdbm-ruby1.8
18. libsoap-ruby1.8
19. libstrscan-ruby1.8
20. libsyslog-ruby1.8
21. libtcltk-ruby1.8
22. libtest-unit-ruby1.8
23. libtk-ruby1.8
24. libwebrick-ruby1.8
25. libxmlrpc-ruby1.8
26. libyaml-ruby1.8
27. libzlib-ruby1.8
28. rdoc1.8
29. ri1.8
30. ruby1.8
31. ruby1.8-dev
32. ruby1.8-elisp
33. ruby1.8-examples
34. libpgsql-ruby1.8

Some brilliant (and I use the term extremely loosely) Debian package maintainer decided to break Ruby into a million little pieces. They must have been big-time haters of Ruby, because the only reason I can think of for doing this is to make it as difficult as possible for Debian users to install a fully-functional Ruby on their system.

I spent some time this afternoon helping a friend install sqlite-ruby on their Debian machine, but a simple little test script was failing. Why? Because he hadn’t installed the libstrscan-ruby1.8 package. I, as the developer of sqlite-ruby, should not have to enumerate every single one of the dependencies that sqlite-ruby has on the standard library, because the standard library should come standard with every installation. Isn’t that what “standard library” means?

Anyway, I’ll get off of my soapbox now.

Stupid Debian…

Edit: Tobias Leutke agrees.