More problems than I care to think about

[Bryan Drewery]

On 11/15/2012 1:03 PM, Paul Schmehl wrote:
> I've been trying to port Snorby to FreeBSD.  Emphasis on trying.  I run
> into problems at every turn, and some seem unresolvable.  Snorby
> requires ruby 1.9.2 or better.  The default version on FreeBSD is 1.8. 
> Putting RUBY_DEFAULT_VER=1.9 in /etc/make.conf breaks some of the
> rubygem ports that will only build on 1.8.
> 
> sysutils/rubygem-bundler was giving me fits.  I discovered that while
> the port version is 1.1.5, the current version, which fixes the problems
> I was having, is 1.2.2.  I created a port update for that and was going
> to submit it, but then I discovered devel/rubygem-eventmachine "blows
> up" with a core dump if built with 1.9.
> 
> This is beyond discouraging and has caused me to abandon the project
> entirely.
> 
> It seems that we need a massive effort to update ruby and rails and all
> gems to the latest versions.  Who is responsible for that?  How can we
> get that done?
> 

I've had similar endeavors with the ruby ports. It's not that someone is
dropping the ball necessarily. Gems really do not work well as ports, in
their current form, due to their hard version dependencies. I've twice
now tried adding ports and given up, as it would mean adding multiple
new ports, copying some others for specific versions, and even
specifically for 1.9. It's all more trouble than it is worth.

Note that I've had similar experiences with Debian as well. On my
production rails sites, I usually just give up and use gem/bundler directly.

I can envision this being fixed by letting gem do its own thing, and
registering those as packages, similar to bsdpan, but I don't think this
idea is popular, and I myself do not have time to implement even a
proof-of-concept.

Bryan