Re: [gentoo-user] Ruby - 3 versions - seriously????

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On 02/09/2017 15:33, Andrew Lowe wrote:
> Hi all,
> 	I'm in the process of doing a world update and due to a failed compile,
> I have cause to look up through the list of stuff to compile/update.
> Imagine my surprise when I saw there were three versions of Ruby wanting
> to update:
> 
> [ebuild     U  ] dev-lang/ruby-2.4.1-r4 [2.4.1-r3]
> [ebuild     U  ] dev-lang/ruby-2.3.4-r4 [2.3.4-r3]
> [ebuild     U  ] dev-lang/ruby-2.2.7-r4 [2.2.7-r3]
> 
> Have I managed to stuff up something on my machine or is this really the
> case, there has to be three versions? And to make matters worse, they
> are not big version jumps, + 0.1 -> 2.2, 2.3 & 2.4.
> 
> 	I would prefer to get rid of Ruby, but, if memory serves me correctly,
> someone associated with the kernel decided it would be a good idea to
> use yet another language for something, obviously Python wasn't good
> enough....
> 
> 	Thoughts on the magically multiplying Rubies would be greatly appreciated,


Welcome to the giant clusterfuck that is RubyWorld(tm). Just be thankful
you don't have to support corporate internal code written in it. Or
package gems.

OK, so disclaimer up front. I detest Ruby. I hate it with a passion.

You have to understand what Ruby is. It is not a language. It is 5
languages. Like python27 and python3 are really different languages with
much in common. The difference is the python devs have solid reasons for
doing python3 and the transition has been mostly smooth. Each new minor
version of ruby is a whole new language and the devs are OK with large
breaking changes between minor version numbers.

So why 3 rubys? Because they are 3 languages and you have packages that
for whatever reason are tied to different rubys. Just pretend to
yourself that they aren't really ruby22, ruby23 and ruby24 - they are
php, perl and python (or whatever 3 language names you like that help
you get past the 3 rubys! thing).

You probably need all 3. As housekeeping, you can put this in make.conf:
RUBY_TARGETS="ruby22",
and remove all ruby versions from world
and let depclean, revdep-rebuild and emerge world take care of the details.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com