A Ruby appliance: What would you include?

[Phillip_G]

Phillip G. wrote:

Don’t be afraid. If you can make a case, that @distro is superior in UX,
support, and ecosystem, by all means say so!

But keep in mind that a sizable chunk of users of this Appliance are
more than likely to be utter newbies to Linux and Ruby.

If they are stuck, they’ll look for support on the web, and it is far
easier to find a random forum post that handles an Ubuntu issue than any
other distro (much as I feel that OpenSUSE is superior, personally).

It’d also make things easier for appliance-user MLs, since pointing to
Ubuntu solutions is so easy.

The Appliance’ll have to include custom code, too, to create a smooth
“turn key” experience, I bet, so the choice of distro might influence
this.

The choice of distribution to use is fundamental, and we better
consider all the options now, before a single line of code is written.

Fair points.
I don’t want to pollute Ruby-Talk with … Distro-talk though, so I’ll
start writing on this wave (public wave, accessibly by all):

Status of Google Wave - Google Help

Wave should also be findable with the ‘ruby appliance’ tag
Hopefully your invite comes through quickly…

[Phillip_G]

Aldric G. wrote:

Phillip G. wrote:

Hello, list!

This is, of sorts, a cross post of an idea that lodged itself in my head
pretty firmly.

As part of scratching an itch (gain access to a *NIX environment for my
Ruby work), I’ve setup an Ubuntu VM.

So, I got thinking: Why not offer this to the community as a tool, and
why not include the community in creating the best possible Ruby
environment?

VMWare allows “teams” of virtual machines, which can be set up in their
own little network. It’s something to think about, especially now that
VMWare Player is available for free and all.

I don’t know if Ubuntu is a good choice though. It’s a can of worms, so
I don’t really want to open it, but I suggest Gentoo: it has a tool
available to switch painlessly between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9, which allows
for any and all setup on editors and such to be simple and just link to
#!/usr/bin/ruby … For instance.

It wouldn’t be hard to do this in Ubuntu either, I think, and Ubuntu
configuration is generally very easy.

You’ll definitely need to include emacs and vim, along with the
appropriate plugins, and probably Netbeans/Aptana, so people can check
out different ways of developing.

No, I don’t think it’s appropriate to include an IDE in something like
this. Perhaps there should be links to info about some, but I see no
reason that they should be preinstalled.

Sticking a bunch of tutorials on a folder on the desktop would be a good
idea as well.

Yup.

As a tool, this could come in very handy.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

[Phillip_G]

Phillip G. wrote:

On 29.12.2009 17:03, Aldric G. wrote:

I don’t want to pollute Ruby-Talk with … Distro-talk though, so I’ll
start writing on this wave (public wave, accessibly by all):

Yeah, we should move this whole shebang off-list ASAP.

Why? It’s on topic and would benefit from staying here.

I underestimated the amount of attention this would generate, I have to
say.

Hopefully your invite comes through quickly…

It’s taking its sweet, sweet time.

Well, it should be back on after I had my allotted sleep cycle.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

[Phillip_G]

On 29.12.2009 17:51, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

It wouldn’t be hard to do this in Ubuntu either, I think, and Ubuntu
configuration is generally very easy.

Solvable in a script, that deletes the current symlink, and creates a
new one. Call it switch, give it the commandline argument “ruby”, and
you have a nice little “switch ruby” command.

No, I don’t think it’s appropriate to include an IDE in something like
this. Perhaps there should be links to info about some, but I see no
reason that they should be preinstalled.

Couple of reason pro-IDE:

• Most developers are already used to IDEs, be it Visual Studio,
  NetBeans, or IntelliJ IDEA.
• IDEs (especially NetBeans, IME), provide excellent support for syntax
  highlighting, debugging, and plugin management (NetBeans has a nice
  integration for RubyGems, for example).

Cons:

• Redistribution isn’t always possible
• Redistribution can create a significant overhead
• It’s one more thing to keep track of.

A simple text editor that allows to run Ruby scripts in its buffer(s) at
the push of a button is already a great step forward, IMO.

[Phillip_G]

Phillip G. wrote:

On 29.12.2009 17:51, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

It wouldn’t be hard to do this in Ubuntu either, I think, and Ubuntu
configuration is generally very easy.

Solvable in a script, that deletes the current symlink, and creates a
new one. Call it switch, give it the commandline argument “ruby”, and
you have a nice little “switch ruby” command.

Right.

No, I don’t think it’s appropriate to include an IDE in something like
this. Perhaps there should be links to info about some, but I see no
reason that they should be preinstalled.

Couple of reason pro-IDE:

• Most developers are already used to IDEs, be it Visual Studio,
  NetBeans, or IntelliJ IDEA.

That’s actually a reason not to include an IDE. Developers used to Java
or C* tend to think that all development requires an IDE. It’s probably
a good idea to expose them to the fact that an IDE is less necessary for
Ruby.

In other words, we don’t want people rushing to Eclipse simply because
they’ve always used it. Let 'em install it if they want to, but
hopefully they’ll fire up Emacs or Kate first.

• IDEs (especially NetBeans, IME), provide excellent support for syntax
  highlighting, debugging, and plugin management (NetBeans has a nice
  integration for RubyGems, for example).

Cons:

• Redistribution isn’t always possible

All free IDEs are redistributable, aren’t they?

• Redistribution can create a significant overhead
• It’s one more thing to keep track of.

If we do include IDEs, then I would also push for the inclusion of
full-featured editors like jEdit and KomodoEdit. I actually think these
are far more useful for most Ruby work than are IDEs.

A simple text editor that allows to run Ruby scripts in its buffer(s) at
the push of a button is already a great step forward, IMO.

Perhaps.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

[Phillip_G]

On 29.12.2009 17:52, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

Phillip G. wrote:

On 29.12.2009 17:03, Aldric G. wrote:

I don’t want to pollute Ruby-Talk with … Distro-talk though, so I’ll
start writing on this wave (public wave, accessibly by all):

Yeah, we should move this whole shebang off-list ASAP.

Why? It’s on topic and would benefit from staying here.

Organization. Email is a difficult medium to keep track of a project.

And while an ML is excellent to kick start a project (just like we are
doing here), it ain’t a good repository for code, or to discuss
minutiae.

[Phillip_G]

Solvable in a script, that deletes the current symlink, and creates a new

one. Call it switch, give it the commandline argument “ruby”, and you have a
nice little “switch ruby” command.

A script… called rvm perhaps?

[Phillip_G]

On 29.12.2009 18:07, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

they’ve always used it. Let 'em install it if they want to, but
hopefully they’ll fire up Emacs or Kate first.

That’s myopic. If you want to win over people to use Ruby, you need to
make the transition as easy as possible.

Jeff Attwood wrote an actually worthwhile article on that:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000290.html

There’s also the concept of “conversion” in marketing: The easier you
make it for people to go and get/do something, the more people get / do
that something.

All free IDEs are redistributable, aren’t they?

No. Not all Open Source licenses are compatible to each other, nor does
“free” automatically mean “open source”, either.

If there were a redistributable Visual Studio Ruby IDE, I’d include that
in a heartbeat, damn the torpedoes, just to grab the legions of Windows
developers.

If we do include IDEs, then I would also push for the inclusion of
full-featured editors like jEdit and KomodoEdit. I actually think these
are far more useful for most Ruby work than are IDEs.

If a case can be made, then sure. But we don’t have endless room,
either, alas, so there will be cuts. Which is why IDEs are lower on the
priority list than a good editor that runs Ruby code on the push of a
button.

[Phillip_G]

On 29.12.2009 18:08, Steve K. wrote:

A script… called rvm perhaps?

Extremely simplified in the “Ruby Beginners” VM, yeah.

If there’ll be more than one Ruby variant, anyway (I’d go straight for
1.9.1, actually).

[Phillip_G]

Is “rvm install 1.8 && rvm use 1.8” too complicated? That’s all I use it
for, anyway.

I’d agree, put 1.9.1 on by default.

[Phillip_G]

On 29.12.2009 18:32, Steve K. wrote:

Is “rvm install 1.8&& rvm use 1.8” too complicated? That’s all I use it
for, anyway.

For a beginner, potentially new to Linux? Yup.

And “switch ruby” sounds more natural, too.

[Phillip_G]

Phillip G. wrote:

On 29.12.2009 18:07, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

they’ve always used it. Let 'em install it if they want to, but
hopefully they’ll fire up Emacs or Kate first.

That’s myopic. If you want to win over people to use Ruby, you need to
make the transition as easy as possible.

Precisely why we should have at least one IDE. Maybe we can talk to the
Jetbrains people and have a limited version of Rubymine on there; but
that may be a little later in the game

If a case can be made, then sure. But we don’t have endless room,
either, alas, so there will be cuts. Which is why IDEs are lower on the
priority list than a good editor that runs Ruby code on the push of a
button.

I just heard the sound of SCiTe

Marnen does bring up an interesting point. My idea is to give people
lots of choices. Marnen’s idea is to direct people.
Going back to the documentation – if the VM settles for an editor, then
the documentation can be directed at this editor, and possibly make
everything a lot more painless. I vote for redcar, half-jokingly,
half-serious: http://redcareditor.com/

I’ve started a Wave for the discussion of the editors and gems to add to
the RubyDev VM :

Status of Google Wave - Google Help

I do think this thread is fine where it is but, as has been said before,
specifics shouldn’t pollute this mailing list.

[Phillip_G]

On 29.12.2009 19:11, Aldric G. wrote:

Precisely why we should have at least one IDE. Maybe we can talk to the
Jetbrains people and have a limited version of Rubymine on there; but
that may be a little later in the game

Best would be one in native code, too. On a VM, performance starts to
matter again.

Marnen does bring up an interesting point. My idea is to give people
lots of choices. Marnen’s idea is to direct people.

In an appliance, choices are bad. They are even worse for beginners.

Going back to the documentation – if the VM settles for an editor, then
the documentation can be directed at this editor, and possibly make
everything a lot more painless. I vote for redcar, half-jokingly,
half-serious: http://redcareditor.com/

I’d even say roll our own: Top left a Tutorial, bottom left
Documentation (IntelliSense style, maybe), on the right the editor
buffer, with script output in a pop up window, all this in full screen
mode.

[Phillip_G]

Aldric G. wrote:
[…]

Marnen does bring up an interesting point. My idea is to give people
lots of choices. Marnen’s idea is to direct people.
[…]

Just to clarify my philosophy: I do generally believe in giving people
lots of choices. But I like to do it in such a way as to push them
gently in what seems to be the best direction to go in. Kind of like
what Rails does, in fact.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

[Phillip_G]

On Tuesday 29 December 2009 08:11:38 am Aldric G. wrote:

Actually, you can, but you have to explicitly choose. I don’t recall off
the top of my head, as I haven’t looked in quite a while, but I believe
that Gentoo installs /usr/bin/ruby18 and /usr/bin/ruby19 (as well as
gem18 and gem19), and just toggles the /usr/bin/ruby symlink.

That’s great, until your script wants to run some other script. Maybe
the
“right way” would be to require it somehow, but maybe I just want my
script to
do something like “system rake” or “system gem”. Or maybe I’ve split my
program into several processes, but rather than actually forking,
they’re
distinct scripts.

The point is, in any of these scenarios, the Gentoo way could switch the
ruby
interpreter out from under me.

So, while it’s nice to be able to toggle the symlink, that’s only a
partial
solution. For a real solution, you’d want something like:

/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/bin/
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/bin/

Toggle those in your paths, and have a just plain “ruby”, “gem”, “rake”,
etc
– even install gem binaries in there (or wherever it ends up being).

Aside from that, it has the nice property of the switch being atomic –
there’s no race condition where you might be running gem18 with the
ruby19
interpreter (assuming gem18 has #!/usr/bin/ruby, but as above, you still
want
to be confident that the “ruby” binary is the same ruby that you’re
running.)

[Phillip_G]

http://www.h-e-r-e-t-i-x.org/

… once hosted a Ruby ‘distro’.

The init script was/is Ruby.

I did have it running in a Xen VM around two years back.

I wonder if it is powering …
http://www.h-e-r-e-t-i-x.org/download.htm

MarkT

[Phillip_G]

On 29.12.2009 19:46, Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

Just to clarify my philosophy: I do generally believe in giving people
lots of choices. But I like to do it in such a way as to push them
gently in what seems to be the best direction to go in. Kind of like
what Rails does, in fact.

That’s not at all what Rails does. Rails hits you over the head, drags
you back to its cave, and you better do things the Rails way.

Which worked out pretty well.