From: Chad Fowler <chad@...>
Date: 2007-07-23T01:58:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Import gem to Ruby 1.9

On 7/17/07, Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 17, 2007, at 01:26 , NAKAMURA, Hiroshi wrote:
>
> > Are you and RubyGems maintainers negative to include RubyGems in
> > ruby/1.9.1 ?
>
> No, I don't think we are. We just have that one feature that we
> really need before rubygems is more or less considered feature
> complete. After that there are some bug fixes and other things that
> need to go in, but I'm guessing that'd work out fairly well with the
> ruby 1.9.1 timeframe.
>
> > I have a plan to propose unbundling some libraries such as soap4r, tk,
> > webrick, json, etc.  Maintainer-less libraries such as yaml should be
> > unbundled, too (bear in mind that I'm talking about ruby/1.9).  It can
> > be a gem when RubyGems is bundled in MRI.  It can be a package of
> > another packaging system(deb, rpm, etc.), too.  Users will use
> > favorite
> > packaging system then.
>
> I think this is wonderful. Too long has there been a lot of cruft in
> ruby. This will let meritocracy take over. Ownerless libraries should
> still probably be released in the ruby project on rubyforge tho so
> they can still be represented in terms of ticket tracking and the like.
>

I strongly agree that unbundling a lot of the built in standard libs
from Ruby would be a very positive thing.  One of the major reasons
I'd like to see this happen is that having, for example, a JSON
library in Ruby's core distribution discourages bazaar-like,
evolutionary development of further JSON libraries.  Sure, the code is
Open Source, and patches are (I'm sure) warmly accepted for most of
the standard libraries, but the fact that a library exists and is
"blessed" as being official kills competition to some extent.

A policy to never bundle libraries which aren't necessary for "core
infrastructure" for the Ruby distribution would greatly improve the
sense that the Ruby community hasn't decided that there can/should
never be another TK, SOAP, JSON, RSS, etc. library written from
scratch.

RubyGems is the defacto standard already.  All but a very small few
Ruby developers install it as a separate step.  Including it in the
distribution enables the unbundling of a whole lot of other libraries.

I'm strongly in favor.  We do need to, as Ryan and/or Eric have
already said, make sure we can still upgrade RubyGems externally, but
I don't see any barrier to that being possible.