Comment # 15 on bug 1069441 from Marcus R�ckert

(In reply to Duncan Mac-Vicar from comment #13)
> I can't speak for all ruby developers, but I have done enough Rails to have
> my own opinion.
> 
> I can't imagine the situation where I would use a distro packaged Rails.
> 
> I only need:
> 
> - ruby
> - rubygem-bundler

If you are fine with

a) having all the devel packages on your host
b) you are fine to having to redo all the fixes that we might have in our gem
based packages (e.g. I had a seed-fu fix for a while)
c) you are fine with not getting security and other bugfix backports.

I totally agree for just installing ... bundle install is so much easier.
sadly it totally sucks for maintenance.

(In reply to Duncan Mac-Vicar from comment #13)
> I agree with Ludwig, the steps on -devel packages are confusing, but OSX
> users have it worse, and the majority of Rails developers probably use Macs.

yes ... that's why we have so many intree copies of C libraries in Gems... the
worst is the libv8 gem ... which is a complete libv8 runtime repackaged as gem.
If you are lucky the gem upstream updates the copy of the C library ... and if
you are even more lucky ... you can actually update to that to the version with
the fixed intree copy.
Now you could argue ... "I just build against the system copy" ... if the gem
supports it.

> For example, as Ludwig described, the pattern could install the devel
> packages of the most important gems, but additionally, it could install
> something in the environment that sets NOKOGIRI_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES=1.

This env var is just the same his bundle config cmdline.

If you don't want to use the rpmified gems. Feel free. But this bug is not
about that. your use case is just working fine.
There are users who want to use rpmified rails. And we need it working for
rails apps that we ship. So can we focus on that for now?