These are orthogonal issues -- RubyGems is a package manager for ruby libraries and nothing more. You might use your OS's package manager to install MySQL, Lighty, etc., or you might install from source, but you couldn't use RubyGems to do this. You'd use RubyGems to install the ruby bindings for MySQL, etc.
-faisal
> These are orthogonal issues -- RubyGems is a package manager for
ruby
> libraries and nothing more. You might use your OS's package manager > to install MySQL, Lighty, etc., or you might install from source,
but
> you couldn't use RubyGems to do this. You'd use RubyGems to install > the ruby bindings for MySQL, etc.
Regardless of that I'd recomend using gems. Most of the ruby
libraries
are fast moving targets that the distribution packagers can't really keep up with. You also loose the extras that gems offer.
I concur from experience with Gentoo Linux. Some packages are literally months behind. It took a long time for Rails 1.1 to go stable, and it wasn't until two weeks or so that RMagick was still at 1.11. And that's just two examples.
What I find problematic as well is that some gems may be in the distribution packaging, and others like Mongrel will be missing. It would be quite a mix-up if I were to use both Portage and RubyGems to manage Ruby packages, so I just "emerge" Ruby and RubyGems and then proceed to use RubyGems to manage the rest of the shebang.
I found the FreeBSD ports to be far more up-to-date, but as always YMMV.
Regards,
Roderick