I submitted this bug, and it has been replied to:
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=575&aid=717&group_id=126
I don't pretend to be an expert on the "way things should be", so I thought it would be better to at least allow the opportunity for discussion by bringing it up here.
My own preference for all things, ruby or otherwise, is that anything I install by hand goes under /usr/local, and anything that is installed by the primary package manager (dpkg in my case) goes in /usr. That way I can easily clean up the cruft without worrying about messing up files that belong to packages. Theoritcally there are other reasons too, like having a shared and/or readonly /usr. Gems itself installs in /usr/local/lib/site_ruby, but the gems get installed under /usr/lib/ruby. Gems ought to play in /usr/local or in /usr, but whatever it does it should be consistent. My own preference as you can guess is /usr/local.
FWIW CPAN stays under /usr/local/lib/perl5, with the default configuration.
I for one would now like to hear others' opinions on this.
Hans Fugal said:
I submitted this bug, and it has been replied to:
http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=575&aid=717&group_id=126
I don't pretend to be an expert on the "way things should be", so I
thought it would be better to at least allow the opportunity for
discussion by bringing it up here.
My own preference for all things, ruby or otherwise, is that anything I
install by hand goes under /usr/local, and anything that is installed by
the primary package manager (dpkg in my case) goes in /usr. That way I
can easily clean up the cruft without worrying about messing up files
that belong to packages. Theoritcally there are other reasons too, like
having a shared and/or readonly /usr. Gems itself installs in
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby, but the gems get installed under
/usr/lib/ruby. Gems ought to play in /usr/local or in /usr, but whatever
it does it should be consistent. My own preference as you can guess is
/usr/local.
You can control where the gems are installed with the GEM_HOME and
GEM_PATH environment variables, or the --install-dir command line option.
See http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?EnvironmentVariables for
details.
By default, gems are installed whereever the ruby interpreter is found.
ยทยทยท
--
-- Jim Weirich jim@weirichhouse.org http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)