[chef-dev] Re: Ohai Ruby plugin: system ruby vs. running ruby?

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Aug 31, 2011, at 2:52 PM, Daniel DeLeo wrote:

> So, if your ohai attributes for languages/ruby are empty, what breaks?

In my case, everything related to Chef.  The system-provided version of ruby 
& rubygems is old enough that it will not work with anything related to Chef, 
and yet there are other parts of the system that are dependent on that older 
version being installed and being installed in the system-standard place.  
And they probably also do stupid things like assuming that the path is always 
set up correctly so if they just shell out to "ruby" it will pick up the 
right system-provided version.


So, I can't upgrade the system-provided version of ruby & ruby-gems, but I 
have to have the newer version of ruby & ruby-gems in order to get Chef & 
ohai to work.

Both code bases want to assume that there is one and only one installation of 
ruby on the system, and it is necessarily the version that they need.

That's a majorly, heinously, bad assumption.


You can't go back and fix all the legacy code that wants to make that 
one-and-only-one assumption, but you can at least ensure that all the new 
code will always be able to find the right version that it actually needs, 
without breaking or otherwise causing any disturbance for any of the older 
code.

So, if you're going to program in Ruby, and you're going to build a system 
that requires newer version of the code than what we can get with a 
system-standard install, then the requirement falls onto you to make sure 
that you make things work properly.  Don't break my existing production 
systems with your new code, and don't make me jump through hoops to get two 
incompatible versions installed.

-- 
Brad Knowles 
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