Ruby dissonance with Debian, again

Lucas has written two long, insightful posts on the frustration about the social aspects of integrating Ruby stuff Debian – The first one, on September 12 and the second one, on September 29.

I cannot really blame (thoroughly) the Ruby guys for their position. After all, they have a vibrant community, and they are advancing great pieces of work. And they know who that code is meant for — Fellow programmers. And yes, although it is a pain to follow their API changes (and several of the Gems I regularly use do often get refactorings and functionality enhancements which break compatibility but introduce very nice new features), they say that's solved with one of Gems' main features being the simultaneous installability of different versions.

The key difference in Debian's worldview with Ruby's is they cater to Fellow programmers. Even leaving aside heaps of different positions and worldview/mindset, we have a fundamental difference: Debian cares about its users, whatever that means. So, our users should not even care what language a given application is implemented in – They should only care that it works. We, as packagers, should take care of all the infrastructural stuff.

And yes, that's where we find the conflicting spot: We don't want to ship many versions of a system library (that in this case would be a Gem). Specially if later versions fix known bugs in earlier versions and backports are not available or supported. Specially if upstream authors' only response to a bug in an older release will be "upgrade and rewrite whatever breaks in your application".

As an example of this, I am not currently updating the gems I maintain, as Debian is on a freeze to get out the next stable release. Or if at all, I am targetting those uploads to our Experimental branch, in order not to create a huge backlog for me when the freeze is over (just a series of rebuilds targetted at unstable). And yes, I will have to be responsible for any bugs that will most likely not be supported by most of my upstreams during the next ~2 years.

That's the role of a Linux distribution. And yes, as Lucas writes in the comments he got as responses to the first post – This dissonance comes in no small part because the Ruby developer community is mostly made from non-linuxers. People coming from a background where (mostly propietary) applications bundle up everything they need, where static linking is more popular than dynamic libraries, where there is no coordination between parts of the system are much less likely to understand our work.

And yes, the Perl community is a joy to work with in this regard. And that's the same I understand from the Python one. Because of their origins and where their main strength was grown and remains.

PS - And yes, I will join the flock of people saying that... The specific person that attacked your work is a great programmer, but well known as intolerant and obnoxious. Fortunately, even if our respective cultures fail to mix so much, most of our interactions just end with a "sigh" of lack of understanding, and not with the flames you got targetted with :-/