Howdy all, An interesting blog post from Luke Kanies that sparks an even more interesting discussion in the comments. There seems to be a split between those developers who write software that is expected to run in one place and those who write software that is expected to run in many places. If you, as a developer, know that your software will really only be installed at a single customer [...], then your life is drastically easier -- you don't usually have to worry about cross-platform issues, and you don't have to worry about different users having different needs, because you only have one user. Obviously there's no inherent problem with having the simpler life of a developer with only one user, but it seems to me that the Ruby community is, as a group, largely adopting that perspective as the default. This is worrying to me, because I'm building an application that I expect to be installed in thousands of locations (in fact, it's probably already installed in thousands of locations). I'd like to take as much advantage of existing Ruby code as possible, but it's not exactly easy. <URL:http://www.madstop.com/ruby/ruby_has_a_distribution_problem.html> It's about Ruby's current state of package distribution, but has many points that will be familiar to critics of distutils, setuptools, and cheese shop, or to readers of this forum in the last couple of weeks. -- \ “I cannot conceive that anybody will require multiplications | `\ at the rate of 40,000 or even 4,000 per hour ...” —F. H. | _o__) Wales, 1936 | Ben Finney