Re: Gem Manifest deprecation

2012-04-09 Thread Michel Martens
Hey David, thanks a lot for your reply.

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 8:51 PM, David Dollar  wrote:
> The .gems solution was non-deterministic in the normal use case. If someone
> specified "sinatra" in their .gems file, they would often end up with a
> completely different version in production than they were using in
> development. Sure you could specify an exact version of every gem in your
> .gems file, but few people did and it's a huge pain to maintain.

Yes, I understand how frustrating that would be. Would requiring
specific versions solve it or you think people would keep making
mistakes?

> Bundler splits dependency declaration into what the developer cares about
> (Gemfile) and an exact specification of each version that should be
> installed (Gemfile.lock). This maintains dev/prod parity without the
> maintenance overhead of curating a specific list of gem versions yourself.
> It also has the advantage of not being specific to Heroku.

Understood. I may add that it has the disadvantage of requiring a very
heavy dependency (Bundler), but I guess Heroku's best interest is to
push for the standardization of Bundler, as it simplifies its
operations. It would be great for me if the .gems manifest were
supported in its "strict" version, but I understand I'm part of a tiny
minority.

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Re: Gem Manifest deprecation

2012-04-06 Thread Michel Martens
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Peter Keen  wrote:
> There's always the option of making your own buildpack that reads the
> .gems file or that dep thing, or really whatever you want.

That "dep thing" is a manager for the .gems file, not a different
standard. I know I can have my own buildpack and I know I can do
whatever I want, even use something other than Heroku. That was never
my point, so your email doesn't help a bit.

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Re: Gem Manifest deprecation

2012-04-06 Thread Michel Martens
Hey Keenan, thanks for replying :-)

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:48 PM, Keenan Brock  wrote:
> Hello Michel,
>
> I think this is a great example of heroku being ahead of their time.
>
> When .gems was introduced, there wasn't a way to specify gem dependencies in
> a ruby project.
> Back then, dependencies were a mess - heroku even had to run their own
> custom fork of rails.

There were other means to define dependencies (for instance, Bundler
was initially inspired by this library:
https://github.com/djanowski/dependencies). I think Heroku's solution
was very elegant, and continues to be.

>
> Now, the Gemfile is a common and standard way of specifying dependencies.
> There is a whole community adding features and documenting implications and
> nuances.

It is true that there wasn't a standard before Bundler. What I think,
and I guess most people will disagree with me, is that even though
Bundler was imposed upon every Rails developer, it doesn't mean it is
the standard for the rest of the Ruby community. Sure, I could go
along with the masses and adopt Bundler, but it feels wrong because it
is way out of my workflow. Bundler is a very big dependency, I don't
like the idea of it being imposed on me. Just for reference, this is
the tool we use for managing dependencies at the company I work for:
https://github.com/twpil/dep

> It makes sense for heroku to drop their proprietary tool and go with the
> common one, no?
> That way they can dedicate their resources on other great stuff to give to
> us.

It may makes sense for Heroku, I really don't know if they will lose
clients by dropping support for the .gems manifest. I don't have the
power to avoid that from happening, sadly. If it were up to me, I
would stick to the minimalism of the .gems manifest and also support
Gemfile, given that most of the applications deployed to Heroku are
built with Rails.

Thanks!

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Gem Manifest deprecation

2012-04-06 Thread Michel Martens
Hello, what's the reason for deprecating the .gems manifest in favor
of Bundler's Gemfile?

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