FLAVORS for Ruby

[Adam Weinberger]

> On Sep 13, 2019, at 22:27, Koichiro Iwao <meta at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 09:33:43AM -0600, Adam Weinberger wrote:
>> Systems MUST be able to support concurrent installations of python2.7
>> and actual python. What is your use case for concurrent ruby?
> 
> I know the importance of Python 2. Even if it is EoL-ed, it will be
> required over the next a few years because not a few applications don't
> migrate to Python 3. So that's true and reasonable.
> 
> Excuse me that I'm answering your question with a question. What about
> PHP? Concurrent installation is a MUST?
> 
> FreeBSD ports allows concurrent installations of multiple Ruby versions
> however doesn't allow concurrent installations of rubygems for multiple
> Ruby versions. This inconsistency is the issue for me.

The issue is that FLAVORS has added a substantial (and painful) complexity to python ports and python.mk. It means that a number of people have had to be hyper-vigilant and watch commits closely to catch errors introduced when people utilize the paradigm incorrectly. It’s a bitter pill, but it’s accepted because the use-case for multiple concurrent python versions is essential.

As Antoine said, inconsistency isn’t a strong enough use case. Which brings us back to the original question: is there a specific use-case for concurrent ruby that makes the substantial increase in cognitive load, complexity, and monitoring worth it?

# Adam


—
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
https://www.adamw.org