From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2004-06-25T01:11:32+09:00
Subject: Re: rubygems thoughts

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 11:24:08PM +0900, Hans Fugal wrote:
> First:
>   require 'rubygems'
>   require_gem 'progressbar'
> Right there you're commiting yourself to gem dependencies, which 
> requires rubygems to be installed anywhere you want your package to go, 
> whether you've packaged your program as a gem or not. Therefore it makes 
> no sense to package it as anything but a gem. That 'viral' nature is 
> great for adoption, but not until critical mass has been reached. If not 
> all the dependencies are available as gems, if you decide to go gems you 
> now have a sticky mess of traditional and non-traditional.>

RubyGems no longer requires you to use that scheme; it can install
'library stubs' so 
  require 'progressbar' 
should work.

> Point two, for gems to be really useful pretty much all the common 
> libraries at least need to be gems. That's normal, and what I'd call 
> critical mass for a packaging system. If gems is successful, it will 
> grow quickly, perhaps even exponentially. Sending them by email to an 
> individual is going to quickly become a bottleneck in that case. So 

gem files released through Rubyforge are automatically copied to the
'repository', so direct submission by email is no longer the recommended
way to publish a gem.

> there needs to be an upload system, preferably with gpg signing.

There's unfortunately no security mechanism in RubyGems atm.; this is
somewhat difficult due to RubyGems "distributed" nature, where the
packaging work is pushed down to upstream developers, so even if gem
signatures were implemented, building the web of trust could take some
time.

-- 
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batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com

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