Comment 5 for bug 244742

I wholeheartedly agree that diverging from Debian packages is a bad thing, and got bitten by it way too many times when backporting packages (and having to choose between an older Ubuntu version, a newer Debian version and forward-porting the Ubuntu-specific changes to the newer Debian source).

I agree with the Onigurama example you linked; depending on everything needed to build all possible gems would be silly – but, as you yourself agree, ruby-dev is both needed for quite a lot of gems and the mkmf error is really cryptic.

I don’t think diverging from Debian for just this one change would make sense, but libgems-ruby is already Ubuntu-versioned, and IMHO this particular change is quite trivial, both to introduce and to maintain. Being a Ruby developer I use hand-compiled Ruby versions anyway (also for the unfortunate decision of compiling Ruby with --enable-pthread on Debian/Ubuntu), but I can foresee this being a problem for the regular RubyGems user.

I agree with defering the resolution of this issue until debbugs #466189 is resolved (although it’s been silent for the past nine months). Thanks a lot for your interest in this issue!