> Thus, Zed offering a polite "bug report" rather than bitch and moan about it probably wouldn't have been all that much more effective -- seeing as how it has remained in the current non-functioning state for many years.
And trying to round up a lynch mob is more effective how?
The state of the ruby/rubygems distribution is clearly not viewed as a bug by its maintainers, which is why neither hard work nor a bug report will fix it. Let's give discussion and attention a go.
Did you read what Zed wrote? That's not discussion, that's threatening people. It won't work.
Also, if you read the Debian guy's opinion, it is clear that, behind the scenes, and away from all the kerfluffle, people are doing work to improve the situation.
Also, you people seem awfully sure of yourself. If you peruse the bug reports, you might find some interesting nuggets:
The proposed solution (an environment variable) is crap. That any of the Debian maintainers think that it's a good idea is an indication of how badly broken the Debian process is, and I know that Lucas was trying to do a good thing there. I don't blame him, it's at least an attempt at a fix.
There's already a working solution provided by Apple for Mac OS X and improved upon by the RubyGems team. There's concepts of vendor gems, system gems, user gems, and I think one other level. The Debian team has never considered it despite being told that it's there. The Debian team has also never offered patches that would help RubyGems come more in line with what Debian thinks it should be doing.
Why should the RubyGems guys bother working with uncooperative Debian maintainers?
And trying to round up a lynch mob is more effective how?