ruby gems, use ports or not?

[Vivek Khera]

On Aug 15, 2006, at 10:52 AM, David Sledge wrote:

> I installed rails using gems, I have not seen any problems with it  
> yet.

I personally don't use ruby, but a similar situation exists with perl  
and the CPAN archives.  I used to install all modules via CPAN  
directly, but in the long run it became very difficult to keep up-to- 
date across major perl upgrades, system upgrades, etc.

It is my firm belief that you not mix and match like this: either  
install everything (ie, all of ruby + gems) by hand or everything  
using your package management system of choice.  Anything else will  
eventually end up causing you confusion and difficulty in upgrades.

It is for this very reason that I've been submitting quite a number  
of perl library ports rather than just using the CPAN install of  
them, which would have been easier short-term.