From: Jamis Buck Date: 2004-07-30T07:09:39+09:00 Subject: Re: Including other people's Ruby libs in your package James Britt wrote: > Aredridel wrote: > >> >> Speaking as a packager, don't. Just document, clearly, the dependencies >> and where to get them. >> It's annoying to have to patch away the extra cruft when packaging a >> package for distribution with a linux distro -- but that's the job -- >> make it as light as possible with all the features. > > > I've considered this, but find it potentially too annoying to the user. > > I would prefer that people be able to just download a tarball, extract > it, and copy over a directory to the libs dir. And it just works. On the other hand, it can be very annoying for a user as well when they already have a *newer* version of that same dependency installed, and then they install your library and suddenly things break. If nothing else, provide two versions of your package: one *with* dependencies, and one without. I'm in the camp that prefers applications NOT be shipped with their dependencies included, but I can understand that others may prefer the other way. The moral of the story is that there isn't a perfect solution to this, unfortunately. :( Rubygems' dependency feature comes close, though. -- Jamis Buck jgb3@email.byu.edu http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis "I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."