Bug: No json support anymore in Ruby 2.3.6

[Ronald Fischer]

Hi Ken.

I see your point .... For me, the foremost issue is to confirm, whether this is indeed a bug in the Cygwin package for Ruby, or not, and my posting on the mailing list was mainly intended to draw attention from the Ruby package maintainers (although other comments are, of course, also highly preciated, and in particular without your comment, I would not have known about the concept of default gems). 

I have to maintain a consistent state of our application accross several sites (Cygwin, Linux), and so far, only the new 2.3.6 Cygwin version, which I installed tentaively, has this problem. The previous version was correct in this respect, and all those versions I'm aware of, which run on Linux, also come with json built in. 

For the time being, we just avoid updating the Ruby version on Cygwin (because it seems to be nearly impossible to go back to the previous version once you have updated a package).

BTW, the definition of "default gems" provided on the stdgems site also includes the sentence that "one can not REMOVE them" (because they are bundled with Ruby), so I think it is even risky to deliver an explicit version of this gem as part of our application, which might then be in conflict with those installation which do contain the json gem in a different version. Furthermore, explicitly installing the json gem requires also to download the C compiler and the Cygwin library bindings for Ruby, because json contains C code. I rather would prefer not opening this can of worms....

Ronald

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018, at 17:26, Ken Brown wrote:
> On 11/20/2018 10:39 AM, Ronald Fischer wrote:
> > Hi Ken,
> > 
> > actually, the page regarding the gem list for the Ruby version in question (the one we have at Cygwin) is
> > 
> >      https://stdgems.org/2.3.6/
> > 
> > but this page too lists json as "default gem".
> > 
> > The page https://stdgems.org/ then defines this term as:
> > 
> > "Default gems: These gems are part of Ruby and you can always require them directly"
> > 
> > So from this I would conclude that json (and the other default gems) should be part of the Ruby installation, since "they are part of Ruby". If you disagree with my interpretation, please explain where I undersood the text in a wrong way.
> > 
> > BTW, I think that my viewpoint is also supported by
> > 
> > https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.3.6/
> > 
> > which says that the packages listed on this page are found in the /lib directory of Ruby.
> > 
> > But even if I go along with your interpretation of the text, in that the default gems are delivered as a separated package, they should be available at least on the Cygwin server, and be installable from there, but I did a search for "ruby-default" and could not get a match.
> 
> I was just trying to tell you how to solve the problem.  I wasn't offering an 
> opinion about ruby packaging or which gems should be installed by default.
> 
> Ken
>  ТÒÐÐ¥&ö&ÆVÒ&W÷'G3¢‡GG¢òö7–wv–âæ6öÒ÷&ö&ÆV×2æ‡FÖÀФd¢‡GG¢òö7–wv–âæ6öÒöfðÐ
> ¤Fö7VÖVçFF–ö㢇GG¢òö7–wv–âæ6öÒöFö72æ‡FÖÀÐ¥Vç7V'67&–&R–æfó¢‡GG¢òö7–wv–
> âæ6öÒöÖÂò7Vç7V'67&–&R×6–×ÆPÐ Ð

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple