soxinbox
7/6/2005 12:42:00 AM
I ran into this problem at work. I was trying to do some ruby programs to
help automate some version control stuff. I tried to convince people how
easy Ruby is, but then when I spent a few hours tracking this problem down,
I couldn't really argue that I wasn't going to run into more problems down
the road. With each gotcha, I lost more support. We now use perl for all of
our stuff. It is OK for a ruby programmer to have to deal with these
annoying issues at each major release, but these problems also effect the
end users who are not ruby programmers and not computer savvy.
I know that a lot of work and good code goes into these projects on a
volunteer basis, so I don't want to disparage the great effort, but, in my
opinion, this work would shine that much brighter if there was just a small
amount of effort put into ensuring that beginner users did not run into
basic problems during new releases and installs. Just ensuring that new
installs work on a minimum of platforms like Linux, windows, and cygwin,
would go a long way.
Imagine when someone makes the big step to try using ruby for the first
time. They install with the one click editor, use the included Scite editor,
and try one of the basic sample programs in the IRB window. They immediately
notice that every character they type shows up twice in the window.
Realizing that that isn't working they try to cut and past a small program
from the editor window to the irb window, and irb gets all confused with the
carriage returns. If they are not completely discouraged by this point they
might try to run an existing program in a cygwin shell, and get the ubygems
error. That is about as far as anyone will go in trying something new, and
we have just lost another ruby convert.
"Ryan Leavengood" <mrcode@netrox.net> wrote in message
news:44059.206.157.248.34.1120600225.squirrel@www.netrox.net...
Curt Hibbs said:
>
> You can tell the One-Click Installer not to prepend "rubygems" to the
> RUBYOPT environment variable.
>
> When you get to the "Choose Components" screen, the component "RubyGems
> Package Manager" can be unchecked to completely omit RubyGems or,
> alternatively, You can click on the plus to expand the subitems and just
> uncheck "Enable RubyGems" (this will still install RubyGems but not set
> RUBYOPT).
Cool. Then I guess the main problem is most people are not aware of this,
and they get bit by it being on by default. Again, I think this is fine,
but maybe this option needs to be made more explicit for those who don't
want it.
Ryan