[LRUG] November talk proposal

[James Adam]

(Forgot to reply all.)

On 11 Oct 2012, at 11:12, James Adam <james at lazyatom.com> wrote:

> On 11 Oct 2012, at 11:01, Paul Battley <pbattley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I can't help feeling that it reinforces my original point, though:
>> just running "rake" isn't trivial, and there are multiple opinions on
>> the best way to do it, all of which involve some level of environment
>> customisation - more than simply typing "rake<enter>".
> 
> I wish it were that simple.  However, the only way to make it as trivial as you'd like is to insist that every bit of software on your system sits within a single consistent set of dependencies, and that's just not practical if you're developing software.
> 
> Unless you're suggesting that you should only need to have one version of any given executable on your system, if you want to run commands using a shell interpreter you are always going to have to manage your PATH.
> 
> Given that customising your environment is therefore inevitable, binstubs as Tom outlined in his post feels like a solution in exactly the right place. And the beauty of the way shells work is that PATH can contain relative directories, so you can have you cake (isolate versions of executables of libraries) and eat it (easily run the right versions of those executables when you're in the appropriate directory) too.
> 
> - James