[Nix-dev] Better support for Ruby

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Charles Strahan's message of Sat Jul 26 19:43:29 +0000 2014:
> Hi all,

Well - depends on what you're looking for.
nixpkgs-ruby-overlay has been in use by me for a long time and often
does a resanobly good job

https://nixos.org/wiki/nixpkgs-ruby-overlay

There are some minor problems such as you having to download a dump of
RubyForge (which I don't update regularly right now).

It does not support lockfiles yet - but you could turn lockfiles into
that such .nix code.

The best thing would creating a mirror and fetching package descriptions
on the fly via API on demand - but with defined revision so that
results can be reproduced.

I started this alternative approach after giving up on the "generate
.nix files for nixpkgs" for both Haskell/ruby. I also tried this for
Python, but that time I failed because dependency information on PyPi
was weak or dynamic (determined by setup scripts) often.

Thus the way to move forward would be creating a global package
database which contained all information for everyone.

(And also make C/C++ gnome and whatnot folks use it ..)

That's my view - it could be incomplete.

Marc Weber