[ruby-core:31242] Re: [Bug #3140] gem activation has changed between 1.8 and 1.9

On Jul 12, 2010, at 8:47 PM, Yusuke ENDOH wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> 2010/7/13 James Tucker <[e-mail]>:
>> 
>> On 13 Jul 2010, at 01:04, Roger Pack wrote:
>> 
>>>> If you 'gem install mongrel' on 1.9, it will fail (for a valid reason). The directory is not removed because that would prevent users from debugging the build process by reading 'gem_make.out' that is left there for this purpose.
>>> 
>>> Yeah I've run into this before.  I even filed a bug for it with
>>> rubygems, but nothing was done.  Maybe Eric is too busy?
>> 
>> It is NOT a bug in rubygems. It's a bug in gem_prelude.rb. gem_prelude.rb is broken by design. I may have even marked that ticket as invalid for you.
> 
> 
> gem_prelude.rb was imported by Eric himself at r14011.
> 
>  commit 369697bcebcfd05a2b7d541d59a85fa529cfe6c9
>  Author: drbrain <drbrain@b2dd03c8-39d4-4d8f-98ff-823fe69b080e>
>  Date:   Sun Nov 25 03:26:36 2007 +0000
> 
>      Import fast-loading gem_prelude.rb from RubyGems.
> 
>      Import RubyGems r1516.
> 
> 
> I wonder when and why he thought that gem_prelude.rb was different
> product from rubygems itself, and that he was not a maintainer for
> gem_prelude.rb.

The situation with gem_prelude goes back many years now. Originally it was written by Rich Kilmer. I have discussed with Rich about gem_prelude at length to get an idea for what features it is meant to have.

Because 1.9 has been going on for a long time now, gem_prelude got stale. The bug we are all working hard to fix does not manifest right away, so I suspect that people may have either thought it was an issue with other parts of 1.9 and worked around it. Because gem_prelude is unique to 1.9, up to now it has not gotten the time and care we all now recognize it requires.

At some point, nobu began to work on gem_prelude. I do not know for sure, but perhaps Eric believed nobu was taking over as gem_prelude maintainer. This does not matter though. We know the bugs, we are now actively working to fix them.

I hope to guide gem_prelude more smoothly in the future.

 - Evan

> 
> -- 
> Yusuke Endoh <[e-mail]>
> 
>