On 1/24/07, Scott Parkerson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm trying to come up with a relatively good way to take a Gem and > re-package its contents for other package managers. I've seen a > Gem2Spec tool for converting Gems to RPM spec filesout there, but > would like to dig a little deeper. My specific area of interest is > Conary, which is *not* a household name (yet).
I don't think that your proposal is a good idea, even if your operating system supports (demands) it. One of the fundamental features of RubyGems is that multiple versions can exist side-by-side, even if those versions are otherwise incompatible, and users can specifically force a version (e.g., "gem '=1.2.3'"). When you subvert the RubyGems structure, you *will* break the expectations of people who expect "gem" (previously "require_gem") to work. This matters because individual applications in Rails can be fixed to specific versions of Rails. Trying to change this *will* piss people off at your distribution's support of Ruby and will encourage them to ignore the hard work you're doing and build Ruby themselves. Your best bet is to *use* RubyGems and simply wrap a gem in your package manager's format. RubyGems installations are non-destructive and can be rolled back without any problems since they're *always* in a new directory. I know that there are Rails applications I have used in the last few weeks that fix themselves on a specific version of Rails, because they're theoretically *incompatible* with later changes. FWIW, the "gem" method can also do '~>1.3.1' which means that any version including and after 1.3.1 up to but not including 1.4 will be acceptable for the program. This *is* different than Perl package managers. This *is* different than Python package managers. This is one of the things that I think that makes RubyGems good. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Rubygems-developers mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers
