bryanthompson's Journal: Ruby people need to get their crap together

I've jumped feet first into learning how to use Distributed ruby, which has been a lot of fun and very interesting. I love ruby (not as much as Java, but close), and want to contribute to the cause. Here are just a couple of things that are making me furious at the moment:

1. There are half a dozen ways to install Ruby, and it is possible to have several versions installed with competing libraries. I installed via DarwinPorts, since I needed a working rubyzip package on osx, and every other rubyzip is broken. So, I'm stuck with DarwinPorts.

2. No documentation, whatsoever. Take a gander at these docs: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/. Horrible, horrible documentation. I have literally opened the source files for all of the distributed ruby and rinda packages and have re-written my own documentation. Why in the world should this be necessary?

3. It is damn near impossible (from what I've been able to find) to tell which version of which packages you are using, then updating them is totally hit-or-miss, as there are no clear way to tell which packages work on which platforms (rubyzip, drb, rinda).

Do all languages have this problem, or is this unique to Ruby? I think the Rails people have it together pretty well, but Ruby itself needs some management.