Speaking as a non-developer (I know, I know, throw bottles at the drooling IT guy), I see traces of my own Ruby frustrations in this blog post and the replies here. I’m interested in running Discourse, but I don’t necessarily have the time or ability to contribute code to the core project.
I sort of kind of WAS under the impression there was some kind of magical “install Ruby” command I could run—I’m spoiled by APT and the magic of Debian packages. When setting out to get Discourse up and running, I thought it would be as easy as “sudo aptitude install ruby” with maybe some config file tweaking—I mean, I set up php-fpm without any problems. Hell, I even got bind9 and isc-dhcp working together so I could do DNS & DHCP the right way on my LAN! After fighting through that mess, how the hell hard could it be to set up Ruby?!
Yeah.
A weekend later, I have a functional Discourse install, but there were so many steps involved (and so much backtracking) that I’m not terribly sure I could repeat the install if I had to. I know that the way around that would have been to simply deploy all of this in a VM and lean on the automated processes, but as a Ruby Newb I truly had no idea that installing Ruby + the gems I needed in the way necessary to make it all work would be quite so much like upending a toy chest on the nursery floor…except instead of a toychest and a floor, it’s a whole shitload of ruby things and gems and bundles and stuff all over my drive.
It’s apparent that Discourse is being crafted with care and that you guys are driving toward a great package, but do keep it in mind that non-devs want to play too! You don’t have to be issuing pull requests left and right to enjoy deploying and hacking around with FOSS, and us casual users with a penchant for deploying half-tested software in production want to be included in the journey 