July 2006
Intermediate to advanced
906 pages
23h
English
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Chapter 18. Packaging and Distributing Software
No matter how productive it makes you, a programming language won’t save you any time if you can’t take advantage of a body of code written by other people. A community works faster than any one person, and it’s usually easier to install and learn a library than to write and debug the same code yourself.
That is, if you can find the library in the first place. And if you’re not sucked into an mess of dependencies that grow and grow, making you want to write the code yourself just so you can be doing some real programming.
The success of Perl’s CPAN archive has made the Ruby community work on our own centralized code repository and packaging system. Whatever you think of Perl, you must admit that a Perl programmer can find just about any library they need in CPAN. If you write your own Perl library, you know where to send it: CPAN. This is not really a technical aspect of Perl, but it’s a powerful component of that language’s popularity.
The problem of packaging is more a logistical problem than a
technical one. It’s a matter of coordination: getting everyone to agree on
a single mechanism for installing packages, and a single place to go to
find those packages. For Ruby, the installation mechanism is Ruby gems (or
rubygems or just “gems”), and
rubyforge.org is the place to go to find gems (packaged libraries and
programs).
In many recipes in this book, we tell you to use a gem for some task: the alternative is often to show you pages and ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.