Hacker News Reader

> Fun fact: KDE 4.x depends on ruby in most distros. Do you know why? Dolphin ships with a ruby script to update some folders (don't remember what it does). Nobody runs it. That's it.

Why did they allow an additional dependency on Ruby in? It seems like perl or python would be the more logical choice, given they'd already be on the system (heck.. maybe bash?)

View on HN

Probably because a Ruby activist wrote a cool script and no-one cared about the implications of a new dependency at all.

I fear many projects seems to take the infrastructure and manpower of large distros for granted these days.

Bash would have been more appropriate, yes. I don't think the author of the script even thought it was going to be run by users, but some debian package checker probably flagged ruby as a dependency and there it was.

> Bash would have been more appropriate

A script that is compatible with POSIX Bourne shell (/bin/sh) would be more appropriate. FreeBSD, for example, does not come pre-installed with bash. If you want cross-platform portability, this is a better default.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com