Comment 28 for bug 307462

Lucas Nussbaum wrote on 2010-04-27:
> On the other hand, lots of people are not that unhappy with the state of
> Ruby in Debian/Ubuntu.

Argument from silence doesn't really hold much weight. The pthreads issue is longstanding known issue in the ruby community. The refusal of ubuntu to address it caused many ubuntu users to go build our own ruby, which I've done on any system where I cared about ruby performance for the last 3 years or so. I'm only speaking up now because I'm trying to be a better community member, what ever that means.

> It would be better if the energy spent on REE would be spent on
> improving Ruby 1.8 or 1.9... But anyway.

Actually all of the patches were submitted back upstream, but ruby-core are very slow to move.

> There are currently plans to
> provide a way to support several ruby versions at the same time, with
> all the libraries available for all implementations. It might make sense
> to package REE at this point (or just apply the patches to a special ruby1.8 build).

I'm very much in favor of this. Although at the moment, REE is only a ruby 1.8.7 alternative, not 1.9. The difference tho for memory usage between REE & MRI 1.8.7 is striking. The current deb's provided by phusion for REE install the ruby binaries to /usr/local, which may or may not be a problem for other users consuming them.

> Are you aware that RVM messes with your .bash* to achieve what it wants to do?

Considering that it gives you the ability to do things like gemsets, project specific configuration, I think the tradeoffs far outweigh the risks.

Besides I dump all the default ubuntu .bash* tweaks anyway, and rvm works fine with what I use, and hasn't caused any problems to date.

Further rvm allows to manage ruby for each user without the need for elevated privileges, which is quite nice for a number of reasons.