Eric Hodel talks with InfoQ about his longstanding involvement with the Ruby community, focussing on his recent role as the maintainer of RubyGems, the de facto packaging system for Ruby libraries and applications. Eric also discusses his local Ruby user group Seattle.rb and his involvement with the Ruby Hit Squad, creators of the deployment automation tool Vlad the Deployer
GitHub have launched a desktop client for Mac OS X called simply GitHub for Mac.
For many years the platform dependency issues in .NET we very easy to understand. Almost everything people used was marked as either compatible with .NET Compact Edition or with the full edition. Aside from .NET Micro, which hardly anyone used, there wasn’t much else to worry about. But now that there is over a dozen active frameworks to choose from, the situation has grown quite complex.
Microsoft has released NuPack CTP 1, an open source package manager for .NET. OpenWrap is another package manager for .NET with many similarities and some differences. CoApp is a package manager for Windows featuring updates and support for multiple languages like C, C++, .NET, PHP, Python, Perl.
Package managers are well known in the Linux world where the need to bring together dependencies from a wide variety of sources. But for .NET developers there isn’t really an equivalent. Even if one sticks to just Microsoft components, the libraries are scattered across Microsoft’s many web sites as well as independent sites such as SourceForge. OpenWrap is a new project that aims to address this.
The Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform (CoApp) is intended to be a package management system for Windows, providing support for compiling, building and deploying open source projects usually developed on other platforms like Linux, Mac OS, etc.
Managing libraries and dependencies is tedious. Clojars is a new hosted repository for Clojure libraries inspired by Ruby Gems and Gemcutter. Together with a new build tool, Leiningen, Clojars takes the pain out of library management. InfoQ talked to Alex Osborne about Clojars and how it works.
From the beginning, the .NET runtime had a decent packaging system based on a collection of assemblies. While far better than loose script files or collections of class files, it is not as convenient as statically linked executables or executable JARs. Vasian Cepa’s .NETZ gives developers the ability to compress .NET assemblies and pack them into a single executable file.
Rip is a new package management system for Ruby. Why a new package management system? We talked to Rip developer Chris Wanstrath from GitHub to learn more.
