[DRE-maint] RubyGems Debian package

[Daniel Brumbaugh Keeney]

There have been some rather heavy complaining on ruby-talk lately
about how Debian packages rubygems.
I don't know if any of you are on that, and I'm not involved in
rubygems development, but it's a rather integral part of ruby
programming.
It seems the key concern is the fact that RubyGems was modified
without sending changes back to the rubygems developers, and that they
were made in ways that instead of making rubygems work with the way
Debian installs RubyGems you made a version of RubyGems that only
works on Debian systems.

Specifically, a number of issues seem to stem from this:
Debian added a hard-coded hack RubyGems to use /var/lib instead of
using GEM_PATH and GEM_HOME.

"it is regrettable that Debian didn't instead add GEM_HOME to /
etc/profile (or equivalent)"-from Ruby-talk

And in case you're wondering, RubyGems developers are aware that
"environment variables is a lousy way to keep around configuration for programs"

However, that's the way RubyGems works, and changing it is going to
cause problems.


Daniel Brumbaugh Keeney