[Nix-dev] Better support for Ruby

[phreedom at yandex.ru]

On Saturday, July 26, 2014 15:43:29 Charles Strahan wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> There was some recent talk about difficulty with Nix+Ruby
> <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/13381>, and from
> the looks of it, it's been a couple years since the Ruby infrastructure in
> Nixpkgs was last touched (the `nix' rubygems plugin itself was last
> released in 2011).
> 
> I will be using/supporting Ruby in my soon-to-be job (after about 7 months
> of fantastic funemployment time :D), so it's very important to me that Nix
> has good ruby/gem/bundler support. As I will be pushing for the production
> use of NixOS, I'll have quite some skin in the game.
> 
> Given both my own interests in the success of Ruby on Nix and my experience
> with Ruby and its packaging, I would like to coordinate development efforts
> in this area. I would love to hear about particular use cases and any
> problems with the current setup, and what features you don't care for (that
> way we aren't limited by legacy design choices). I will soon begin work on
> an alternative to the old `nix' gem, and I'll see if I can get Bundler
> working well too.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the old nix gem if you treat it as a way 
to quickly generate/update some gem expressions which you might have to fix by 
hand a bit. Projects tend to keep their gems in a separate file and update 
them as necessary, so there's already a large overlap with the way bundler and 
rvm are used in practice.