From: Sean O'Dell <sean@...>
Date: 2004-06-25T03:49:34+09:00
Subject: Re: rubygems thoughts

On Thursday 24 June 2004 11:24, Chad Fowler wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 02:48:59 +0900, Jim Weirich <jim@weirichhouse.org> 
wrote:
> > Jim Weirich said:
> >
> > <nothing!>
> >
> > I hate it when I hit send by accident!
> >
> > > Sean O'Dell said:
> > >> I didn't realize this either.  Someone ought to write a definitive
> > >> tutorial on Gems and maintain it with each release.  The examples
> > >> I found left a lot of things unexplained and it was a painful
> > >> session of trial-and-error to get my gems working properly, and
> > >> even then, I didn't know there was a way to bypass the "require_gem"
> > >> statement.
> > >>
> > >> If any more work is done on Gems, I strongly recommend it be on good
> > >> documentation, and then maintain those docs to update it for the
> > >> changes made in the future.
> >
> > We are currently reworking the command structure of the gem command.  It
> > grew to be a confusing hodge-podge of options and suboptions.  The new
> > gem command will follow the cvs model (e.g. gem install ...) and the
> > options will be clearly identified for each gem command.  The internals
> > will be much cleaner as well.
> >
> > At that time we will revisit the documentation and make sure it gets
> > updated.  Documentation is high on our priority list.
> >
> > Thanks for the feedback.
>
> While vacationing in Europe, I'm working on what will hopefully be a
> very thorough and friendly guide to using RubyGems.  Hopefully I'll be
> able to share more when I get back.
>
> Sorry for not being personally more responsive to RubyGems
> questions/issues over the past week or so.  I've been traveling with
> family...supposed to be on vacation. ;)
>
> Thankfully, there are a lot of knowledgable RubyGems people, so even
> with two of us out of town on vacation work continues (perhaps even
> better without us...what do you think Jim? ;)

It would be nice if Gems also used the directory structure used by setup.rb; 
it works well and is very friendly with C extensions.  It would be nice if 
Gems used the same exact layout so I didn't have to script two completely 
different layouts for setup.rb and then for Gems.

It would also be nice if Gems weren't just for Ruby libraries, but an 
operating-system-independent distribution system.

	Sean O'Dell