[DRE-maint] Bug#705167: Subject: compass-susy-plugin: Either broken or poor integration with Ruby gem system (resubmitted)

[Josh Stern]

Package: compass-susy-plugin
Version: 0.9-2
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

Being new to Susy/Compass/Ruby but wanting to develop web pages using 
Susy, I installed the packages for compass and
compass-susy-plugin, and then attempted to follow the web tutorials, 
including this one:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/responsive-grids-with-susy/ 


Somewhere in the course of doing that, I executed the command:

sudo gem install susy

The getting started page for Susy itself also instructs that:

http://susy.oddbird.net/guides/getting-started/


I ended up not being able to run any of the example demos at either 
site.  In every case, running "compass" gave an error on any attempt at 
using the Susy macro/mixin called "at-breakpoint" and also other errors 
in the packages.

I was able to fix the problem on my system by purging the wheezy 
packages compass-susy-plugin, compass, and sass, and doing sudo gem 
installs of those packages through Ruby.  After doing that, the demos 
worked fine.  At this point my /etc/alternatives/ruby points to Ruby 1.9 
and my compass script is in /usr/local/bin/compass.

As a result of the above, I don't know whether the problem I ran into 
was caused by bad code in compass-susy-plugin or by invoking 'sudo gem 
install susy' on top of it.  But I do think it is a serious bug when a 
newbie gets something that is completely broken and undiagnosable based 
on just following the elementary getting started tutorials.   Therefore, 
I think there is a bug with either compass-susy-plugin it's integration 
with ruby-compass package, or the integration with what happens when one 
runs gem install.   In my case, I wasted a number of hours I would have 
saved if ruby-compass and compass-susy-plugin was simply not a Debian 
package to begin with.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
   APT prefers testing
   APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages compass-susy-plugin depends on:
pn  ruby-compass | ruby-sass <none>

Versions of packages compass-susy-plugin recommends:
pn  ruby-compass <none>

compass-susy-plugin suggests no packages.