In my Ruby packaging in Debian and Ubuntu: Mythbusting and FAQ, I wrote The Ruby developers (or expert users) community is generally very hostile towards Debian. Many harsh words and insults are used in discussions mentioning Debian in the ruby-core@ mailing list, and there are frequent recommendations to avoid the Debian packages and install from sources, which is quite demotivating (Actually, what prompted that blog post is someone calling Debian-specific changes unforgivable).

Zed A. Shaw just provided a very good example of that. Quoting the most juicy parts:

It’s simply a tactic to make sure that you are stuck on Debian.

If we look at this problem from an open source perspective, Debian is at a minimum being a horrible citizen.

What is happening is control is not aligned with responsibility. Debian has taken control of the software package and recrafted it for their very narrow set of system administrator users. However, they refuse to take responsibility for the defect and quality problems they create. Instead I end up being responsible for their mistakes, which is wrong.

If Debian is in control, then Debian should be made responsible. That’s the only way to get them to change it. If they don’t want to be responsible, then they should let me be in control.

I’m imagining a mass petition, maybe some funny ad campaigns, in-person confrontations meant to embarrass package maintainers, SEO tricks to get people off Debian, promotion of any alternative to Debian, anything to make them pay, apologize, and listen.

If you write software and you’re sick of Debian screwing up your gear, then shoot me ideas for how we can make this happen. I think that if enough of us band together to make Debian responsible for its actions we can actually get them to start asking us before they package our software to find out how we think it should be packaged.

On the technical part of the post:

The problem that Zed is experiencing is unknown to me, and also to the Debian and Ubuntu bug trackers. To my knowledge, rubygems doesn’t not require openssl or net/scp to work, and a simple grep through the sources kind-of confirms that. But of course, that blog post was written as a rant, not as a proper bug report.

My best guess is that the gem that Zed is installing requires openssl and net/scp. But of course, rubygems can’t just depend on all the libraries that applications or libraries installed via rubygems could possibly require. Regarding openssl, we had a problem in Ruby because of the licensing situation of Ruby (dual licensed GPLv2+ and Ruby license, linked with openssl, which might raise some eyebrows), so it was split off the main standard library package until recently (and, apparently, in the version Zed is using). For net/scp, it is not part of the standard library, and not a dependency of rubygems, so I don’t see why Zed expects it to be installed.

On the rest of the post:

Following my last post, several people volunteered to help with Ruby on Debian (and Ubuntu). In particular, Laurent Arnoud has been doing some fantastic work fixing the pkg-ruby-extras team’s RC bugs. Also, all the messages of support both in the comments of my last post were very much appreciated.

But I’m really wondering why the Ruby community generates so many poisonous people. All my work on Debian is done on a volunteer basis, and it’s really hard to get so much shit from it.