The Ruby community is probably not interested in dealing with distro packages. I.e. having to get people in their forums asking about some ancient Debian stable version that's no longer supported.
".tar.gz is the most widely used archive format on Linux. Using other formats (.tar.bz2, for example) is discouraged, as it requires additional steps for the packager."
-- so fix the bleeping package system to support bzip2.
I note, too, that Fedora has rubygem packages, which provide Ruby gems directly. Is there something rpm does better than dpkg here?
(Not that I give a flip about Ruby; it's a terrible language. I spent about 6 months building an app in Rails; it took about 3 months to go from "this is easy!" to "but it won't let me do anything hard!".)
> ".tar.gz is the most widely used archive format on Linux. Using other formats (.tar.bz2, for example) is discouraged, as it requires additional steps for the packager."
> -- so fix the bleeping package system to support bzip2.
Here you have a point. That's a fairly silly requirement. However, the rest of the recommendations in the second link are pretty solid.
> I note, too, that Fedora has rubygem packages, which provide Ruby gems directly. Is there something rpm does better than dpkg here?
No, it's a policy/politics thing. Gems break the FHS, so Debian pretends they don't exist. Not knowing it intimately, I don't know Fedora's approach precisely, but presumably they're either allowing FHS breakage, or patching the gems to bring them into line.
Patching them is a non-small job; the number of badly-written gems out there is astounding. I say this as someone peripherally involved with patching them to make them conform to Debian's standards.
> (Not that I give a flip about Ruby; it's a terrible language. I spent about 6 months building an app in Rails; it took about 3 months to go from "this is easy!" to "but it won't let me do anything hard!".)
That's a shame - the limitations of Rails are not an accurate representation of the limitations of the language.
http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html
http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/upstream-devs.html
The second link describes what is wrong with gems-only approach. See also links at the bottom of the first page.