Re: Include Rake in Ruby 1.9

On 10/19/07, NAKAMURA, Hiroshi <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> On 10/15/07, NAKAMURA, Hiroshi <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> Yes. Generally we committers need to keep the stable branch "stable"
>>> (there's no actual svn branch for 1.9 though). Release maintainer
>>> will restrict incompatible change of the bundled version of Rake.
>>> (feature adding must be allowed as far as it's compatible with
>>> former versions.) And when an user installs a new version of Rake
>>> with RubyGems, the user cannot activate the new gem without
>>> declaring 'gem "rake"' explicitly.
>> That's a problem, since most people don't work with Rake as a
>> library, but as a binary. There's no viable way to do "gem 'rake'"
>> from the command-line.
>>
>> I think that the stub that gets installed into Ruby's bin/ directory
>> needs to be either (a) a different name or (b) smart enough to try to
>> grab a RubyGems version before using the default installed version.
>>
>> If Ruby's bundled version of Rake includes bin/rake, then what will
>> happen when I try to install the RubyGems version (since the RubyGems
>> version won't own the already-existing file?).
> When an user newly installs rake with gem command, 'rake' command will
> be installed at /usr/local/bin/rake (or proper location under the user
> policy) or overrides /usr/bin/rake (not recommended from maintainance
> pov though), with 'gem _version_' wrapper I thought.  Is this wrong?

[...]

> I'm afraid that I don't understand 'since the RubyGems version won't own
> the already-existing file?' part.

RubyGems doesn't do system-specific handling that way. It will try to
override /usr/bin/rake if ruby is installed in /usr/bin/ruby (at least
right now). I *think*, though, that RubyGems looks to see if it's about
to overwrite a foreign file and may (should) refuse to do that.

Basically, with the way that RubyGems currently works (it installs
everything side-by-side with the system installation of Ruby), there's
no way that RubyGems could override the preinstalled rake binary. I
could be wrong -- and I'm not interested in trashing my working Ruby
right now to verify ;) -- but I seem to recall that was the case.

Assuming, of course, that system packagers manage to catch up to Ruby's
development path fast enough that it matters (see the debacle from Ruby
1.6 to Ruby 1.8 with Debian -- it's *still* going on, but it's better
than it was).

> So I think the current 'require "rake"; Rake.application.run' is
> enough for bin command. (require "rubygems" fallback is not needed I
> think)

For this to work we'd need to do 'RUBYOPT=rubygems rake' to get the
latest installed version via gem. If we installed the latest version via
tarball, it would silently override, but that tosses the advantages that
RubyGems provides, significantly.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * [e-mail] * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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