Re^2: CPAN and RAA

My understanding of it:

Gems is a packaging mechanism (similar to PPMs in a way; gems may contain extension code that's compiled on the installing system, or binaries for Win32, or pure Ruby code). rubyforge.org is a Ruby-oriented Sourceforge-y site and the default source for gems (similar to how AS provides the default PPM repository), but the gem utility may be pointed at other servers (for beta releases, private repositories, etc). RAA provides a general index of Ruby projects with pointers to where they live (so similar to CPAN but nothing's really available directly from it; you get pointed to rubyforge or the author's site).

Comment on Re^2: CPAN and RAA

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Re^3: CPAN and RAA by samtregar (Abbot) on May 16, 2006 at 19:25 UTC
A list of links to projects isn't very similar to CPAN at all. CPAN is a distributed archive network with sophisticated automatic indexing, which is both more useful and much more complicated than a simple list of links. There's a good reason that no other language has anything close to the size and scope of CPAN - it's a heck of a lot of work to create and maintain! Worse, it requires a massive social effort to get everyone to actually use the same system. -sam	[reply]
Re^4: CPAN and RAA by Fletch (Bishop) on May 16, 2006 at 19:36 UTC
True, to be pedantic (and I'm not one to shirk from pedantry :) functionally it's more akin to Freshmeat than CPAN. In purpose it's similar to CPAN in that it provides a single index point. And yes, it's only a rough parallel.	[reply]