Require and symbolic links

Ruby
1

Hi, thanks to the Shebang my /usr/local/somewhere/over/the/rainbow.rb
get ruby interpretor launched automagically.

BUT, because I need it very often I’ve created a /usr/local/bin/rainbow
symlink to it.

Now, the require in rainbow.rb no more finds the files in
/usr/local/somewhere/over/the/lib directory. So, I used absolute path
and it’s fine, but francky I don’t like absolute paths because anybody
should be able to put and use rainbow.rb on any directory

How can I do to have both this nice symlink without losing relative
require ?

2

2008/11/9 Zouplaz [email protected]:

How can I do to have both this nice symlink without losing relative require

You could try to construct the “real” path with the help of
File.symlink? and File.readlink.

Personally, I wouldn’t bother. There are a couple of install options
that, depending on the situation, make much more sense and
are less brittle:

  1. If you want to make install convenient for other Ruby developers,
    make a gem. (And if they don’t like a gem they’ll know how to unpack
    it and scatter the files all over their harddrives anyway they please.)

  2. If you want to distribute to Linux/Unix users in general, make
    a deb or RPM or whatever package.

  3. If you want to give the program to people who have little
    computer knowledge, try RubyScript2Exe
    (http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/). That packs
    everything into a single clickable executable.

Stefan

3

le 09/11/2008 21:47, Stefan L. nous a dit:

a deb or RPM or whatever package.

  1. If you want to give the program to people who have little
    computer knowledge, try RubyScript2Exe
    (http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/). That packs
    everything into a single clickable executable.

Thanks, I’ll give File.readlink a look - You’re right about using an
adequate packaging solution, except that the final user is me :wink: This
is for a program that I often upgrade and which is runned on 2 machines
having different directory structures - I would like to avoid the
tedious task of modifying the source after every upgrade

4

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 6:47 AM, Zouplaz [email protected] wrote:

Thanks, I’ll give File.readlink a look - You’re right about using an
adequate packaging solution, except that the final user is me :wink: This is
for a program that I often upgrade and which is runned on 2 machines having
different directory structures - I would like to avoid the tedious task of
modifying the source after every upgrade

There are projects like hoe that automate the creation of a gem for
you - you could combine that with a rake task that installs the newly
created gem on both your machines every time you make one.

martin