Package Manager in Ruby - How many are there? Would you want and use one?

Ruby
1

Hi,

I have very recently been able to switch to ruby 2.1.1 finally.

This was made possible by tenderlove because he actually released a syck
gem, which works for me finy - I can continue working with my invalid
yaml files (my whole system setting is in yaml file; ruby autogenerates
whatever other format I need from these yaml files; switching yaml to
valid UTF* was no option for me, so I was stuck). I also use yaml files
with comments, but now all is fine because I can autogenerated valid
yaml files from that.

Anyway, what a lengthy introduction!

My question is, since I feel ambitious and motivated right now:

(1) How many package managers are there in ruby?

I only know of machomebrew. Any other package manager?

(2) Would you want and use a package manager in ruby if there would be
one actually?

I dont like that machomebrew is predominantly mac. I think a package
manager should be agnostic of the underlying OS (and, actually, not tied
to any programming language either; but that is of course wishful
thinking).

I am wondering if there would be sufficient resources to create one or
help polish existing ones to levels that are satisfiable and useful for
people to use on a daily base. Perhaps not just a package manager alone
but also a system manager and a set of tools that aids in installing and
compiling altogther.

2

On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Marc H. [email protected]
wrote:

(1) How many package managers are there in ruby?

I only know of machomebrew. Any other package manager?

Nitrous.io’s package manager, autoparts, uses it too. I don’t know if
it’s
used outside of Nitrous.

(2) Would you want and use a package manager in ruby if there would be
one actually?

I would, but it would depend on how usable the PM actually is. I don’t
like
the feature set of Homebrew quite as well as dpkg/apt-get, but it is
pretty
usable; but the fact that its core and formulas are written in Ruby has
in
fact led me to look at its source and make tweaks here and there, which
I
probably wouldn’t do with a C-based one like dpkg or a Tcl-based one
like
MacPorts.

I dont like that machomebrew is predominantly mac. I think a package
manager should be agnostic of the underlying OS (and, actually, not tied
to any programming language either; but that is of course wishful
thinking).

I’ve had that thought myself, but I’m not sure how it would work.

3

On 14-03-16, 13:03, Marc H. wrote:

yaml files from that.
one actually?
compiling altogther.
You should check out chef:

It’s not exactly a package manager, but it’s designed for server
installation & configuration (it’s like a meta-package-manager), and it
can be used locally too. If you’re looking for something that’s
system-agnostic, they have this pretty well figured out.

It’s quite flexible and modular but someone still has to write those
install cookbooks to handle the requirements of different systems.

Andrew V.

4

Eric C. wrote in post #1140084:

(2) Would you want and use a package manager in ruby if there would be
one actually?

I would, but it would depend on how usable the PM actually is. I don’t
like
the feature set of Homebrew quite as well as dpkg/apt-get

They are very different.

  • homebrew builds everything from source and installs it directly on the
    building system
  • apt-get retrieves pre-built binary packages from a respository and
    installs them with dpkg

Of course, .deb binary packages have to be built from source too, and
there’s a whole set of tools for that. But homebrew doesn’t have any
equivalent of a binary package.

If you want something that installs directly from source on the target
machine and can do binary packages - and is also multi-platform - look
at pkgsrc: pkgsrc: The NetBSD Packages Collection
But that’s not written in Ruby.