Today I installed Apple’s latest OS release: Leopard. One of the most exciting features for me as a Rubyist is the inclusion of a well-designed Ruby installation, complete with RubyGems and a bundle of pre-installed gems for the software I typically use as well as some of the Mac-specific gems most Rubyists would like to have (dnssd, rubycocoa, etc.)
Some of the gems shipped with Leopard are slightly out of date, as can be expected. But since they shipped the software as gems, updating Rails (for example) was as simple as ‘gem update rails’.
Apple has shipped Ruby as one of its Frameworks and has provided first-class integration with its development tools for the first time. They’ve been working with us in the community for nearly a year to get this right and it shows. Kudos to Apple and especially to Laurent Sansonetti and Jordan Hubbard for a job well done.
I can finally remove that extra non-Apple Ruby install I’ve been carrying around for years now and just use the Apple-supported Framework.
(FYI, Giles has completely jumped the shark on this one. Don’t let his poo-pooing worry you.)
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October 28th, 2007 at 05:32 AM
See my update. If it had been a post about Ruby on Leopard, I would actually agree with you.
October 28th, 2007 at 10:08 AM
Two reasons:
1. More mouth than brains. 2. Blogger is the blogging equivalent of AOL in the 90’s—same type of users.
October 28th, 2007 at 03:15 PM
I installed Leopard for the exact same reason – ditching a lot of code from /usr/local felt really good. The only glitch I encountered was installing the mysql gem, which required a few extra compile flags – the WhatsNewInLeopard page over at ruby.macosforge.com had the fix.
Oh, and ruby + dtrace + Instruments is hot. Try it out if you haven’t already.
October 28th, 2007 at 04:56 PM
Are you sure you mean “jumped the shark”? I think Giles has always been brash and opinionated in his writing; wrong or right, that’s his style.
October 28th, 2007 at 05:06 PM
Stephen:
Your elitism is ridiculous.
Steve Yegge http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/—is a n00b, huh?
Fake Steve Jobs and PostSecret bring nothing to the table?
October 28th, 2007 at 05:44 PM
Fight, my minion! Fight!
Actually Chad’s dead on. I’ve run out of things to post about. I think the only topic I’ve got left is how to make your penis bigger with Cincom Smalltalk.
That’ll bring in some interesting traffic.
October 29th, 2007 at 02:06 AM
Grant, good point re: dtrace. Incredible stuff! I should have mentioned it in the post!
November 9th, 2007 at 11:42 PM
During an upgrade of rails my environment became totally muffed up. script/server no longer works on an app and there are 2 (count ‘em) 2 gem directories that stuff can get thrown into. Is anyone else having similar problems?
November 10th, 2007 at 12:18 AM
My strong recommendation is to make sure that /System/Library/Ruby.framework and /Library/Ruby are covered by Time machine before you start installing/upgrading/removing gems. I managed to open a heckofa can of worms, breaking literally everything and having to re-install a good part of the stack.