From: Hugh Sasse <hgs@...>
Date: 2005-09-22T19:46:48+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyGems TODO

On Thu, 22 Sep 2005, Brian Mitchell wrote:

> On 9/21/05, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 3. Eliminate case-sensitivity. Having a Usage gem or a RedCloth gem is
>>    confusing. At the same time, I will also acknowledge that there's a
>
> I strongly disagree on this point. It is common for many filesystems
> to have case-insensitivity and the other way around. I think the
> solution is to encourage a specific naming scheme that is only a

I'd supplement that with more intelligent failure, but failure
nonetheless [cf PragProg axiom "Crash Early"]:
     require "Deadpeople"
   "Deadpeople" not found, but I see "DeadPeople", at line <mumble>.

>
> There are people who are annoyed by small things like this but it
> comes down to the authors decision. However, there is a feature that
> could remedy some of this pain: why not support intelligent aliases?
> One could alias a specific gem to a new name that may or may not
> specify a version. The cool effect is being able to configure a little
> more agilely. Imagine two packages that use the same compatible API.
> Now if I wanted to switch which one I used what would I use. Right now
> a switch in code or some config file would have to be used. If gems
> supported an alias system we could solve a lot of these issues.

I like this but fear namespace clashes...
>
>
>> 6. Post-installation message capabilities. Let me give the user a
>>    message to see after they've installed the gem.
>
> This is a good thought. I would like to see something like this,
> _however_ rdocs do get us most of the way there. Everyone, you are
> using rdoc right???? Making the documentation more accessible might be
> a good idea. gem_server works but a good CLI tool might be in order.

   gem ri

would be a good idea, I think.  Unless we tweak ri to search the
gems anyway, but
   while dreaming
     gem ri -r ChunkyBacon
     raise Hopes
   end

>> 9. External (e.g., non-Ruby) dependencies references would be useful.
>>    I'm thinking something like:
>>
>>      spec.external_dependencies = { 'ImageMagick' => 'http://....' }
>
> Yes. I agree that there needs to be a way a user can find what he
> needs w/o trying to install first. The script could then setup the
> environment, throw exceptions (for custom failures), and other things
> I haven't thought of yet.

Oh, yes!!! I asked for this in autoconf, but didn't get anywhere.
It was argued that it would be too much maintenance.

gem dependencies -r Rails.

If each gem knows about its dependencies, then it could be recursive

gem dependencies --remote --recursive  Rails.

>
>> 10. "Optional" dependencies. That is, things that aren't *required* to
>>     make the gem work, but can add additional functionality. This would
>>     apply to both gem dependencies (as Text::Format can use
>>     Text::Hyphen, but doesn't require it for basic operation) and
>>     external dependencies.
>
> Yes. Again, this one should be very high priority IMHO.

Yes, please, see above!

         Hugh