Eric Hodel
7/3/2008 12:35:00 AM
On Jul 1, 2008, at 22:59 PM, Jeffrey 'jf' Lim wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 11:49 AM, fedzor <fedzor@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You all know the error. missing require, blah blah. Seriously,
>> nothing new
>> here. here's the scoop
>>
>> But I found that zlib was missing from the latest ruby version on my
>> Ubuntu. I download and install from source the latest version, and
>> while
>> installing rubygems, it complains of missing zlib!
>>
>>
> ruby doesnt depend on zlib, so ubuntu's correct. Only rubygems does.
> apt-get
> install zlib1g
Much like the readline, iconv, and openssl bindings, the zlib binding
is a part of ruby and like the others I mentioned, gets fairly
frequent use. In these respects, ruby (specifically, language,
library, and user community) does depend on them.
Furthermore, these C libraries are usually available on most operating
systems, so I find it reasonable to assume their ruby bindings are
available.
Making zlib (and similar libraries) an additional component that must
be found by the user causes confusion and creates a support burden for
people who have no idea what to do to fix it.
I've had various tickets filed against RubyGems because zlib or
openssl or rdoc was missing. It isn't my job to figure out a certain
platform requires extra installations just to get basic ruby
functionality, nor is it my job to track changes to package names and
installer arguments per platform, but I end up being the one who has
to deal with it.
I would be much happier if everybody's ruby worked reasonably the same
when they installed ruby, no matter the package system.
In this case, the problem was missing zlib headers, which falls under
the same general category of a support problem foisted onto
undeserving project maintainers.