> Of course Zed's hyperbole is rampant but that's what makes him fun to read.

Does he want to be 'fun to read' or fix a problem? Because pissing all over other people's hard work and attributing nefarious motives to them to boot is not a good way of fixing the problem.

> The way Debian attempts to micromanage rubygems is insane and ends up breaking under real world environments. Why do they persist?

Good question - why not do some research and find out?

(BTW, I'll add that there are good reasons not to use Debian's gem packages, and that I disagree with the 'pile-on' downvoting of the parent post, even if I disagree with what he said)

Being fun to read gives him a disproportionately large audience, which increases the chances of things getting fixed.

It would not. The Debian maintainers created the status quo deliberately. Causing a stir would be far more effective than another bug report.

> Why do they persist?

Because they have a systemwide mechanism for doing precisely the same thing rubygems is trying to do with Ruby, that system has been in place longer than Ruby itself and has proven to be one of the major strengths not only of Debian, but, in similar implementations, of all Linux distros.

We have explored this before - if Zed wants a Ruby that works his way, he should install a separate one, like Python developers do with virtualenv or a source tarball. Then his gems will be, hopefully, installed somewhere sane out of the way of update the system.

If gem installs its libraries on the wrong place then, it's a bug with gem, not Debian.