This is in no way specific to Ruby — if you look at the way any sufficiently advanced software you're familiar with is packaged in Debian, you'll find it to be completely fucked. Ancient versions, nonstandard configuration files, random things disabled at compile-time (often for ideological reasons), files scattered everywhere with the new locations hardcoded, with basic features broken into separate packages. My favorite is the random patches, which when they aren't in the service of the aforementioned ridiculousness, are mostly cherry-picked from current upstream versions to 'fix bugs' without accidentally introducing features because they're afraid of new version numbers. When a patch doesn't fit those categories you really have to worry, because now they're helping (see OpenSSL)
The result is that any program or library that you use directly must be sourced from upstream, especially if it's less than 15 years old or written in a language other than C or C++. Luckily pretty much all of the modern programming language environments have evolved to cope with this onanistic clusterfuck.
Haskell has more fucked by Debian than any other language I know of — when I last had to deal with it a year ago there were two broken+old builds of GHC with different package names and mutually-exclusive sets of packages that depended on them. On top of that the version of cabal (Haskell's packaging tool) in the repository was so far out of date that you couldn't use it to build anything remotely recent (including useful versions of itself), nor could you use it with anything in Hackage (the central repo).
My old roommate had listened to me bitch about this stuff for years, and always dismissed me as crazy for thinking that the packaging was fucked (though he did share my hate of debian-legal). Last week he called me out of the blue and apologized — he'd installed Wordpress through Debian and they'd broken it up into a bunch of library packages, but still left a base skeleton of random php files and symlinks, accomplishing nothing but breakage and unportability.
The result is that any program or library that you use directly must be sourced from upstream, especially if it's less than 15 years old or written in a language other than C or C++. Luckily pretty much all of the modern programming language environments have evolved to cope with this onanistic clusterfuck.
Haskell has more fucked by Debian than any other language I know of — when I last had to deal with it a year ago there were two broken+old builds of GHC with different package names and mutually-exclusive sets of packages that depended on them. On top of that the version of cabal (Haskell's packaging tool) in the repository was so far out of date that you couldn't use it to build anything remotely recent (including useful versions of itself), nor could you use it with anything in Hackage (the central repo).
My old roommate had listened to me bitch about this stuff for years, and always dismissed me as crazy for thinking that the packaging was fucked (though he did share my hate of debian-legal). Last week he called me out of the blue and apologized — he'd installed Wordpress through Debian and they'd broken it up into a bunch of library packages, but still left a base skeleton of random php files and symlinks, accomplishing nothing but breakage and unportability.