From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2004-09-16T13:30:12+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] RubyGems 0.8.0

Thanks Chad; this is a groovilicious release.  For the collective
readership's benefit, I'd like to provide a few comments.

The library stub thing is dead.  If you do this:

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'active_record'       # (A)

then line (A) will cause 'active_record' to be loaded either from
site_ruby or from a gem (any gem).  This gives us the transparency we've
been looking for.  I believe a 'site_ruby' install will get first
preference, so if you have version requirements [1], then you should do
this:

  require 'rubygems'
  require_gem 'active_record', '= 0.7.9'

Rich strongly recommends setting the environment variable RUBYOPT to
'rubygems'.  That's something each user has to do.  I recommend that
developers make it easy for their users by including code like this:

  begin
    require 'ubygems'     # (B)
  rescue LoadError
    warn "Don't have RubyGems 0.8+" if thats_a_concern?
  end

  require 'active_record'

This will now work on any user's machine, whether they have RubyGems
installed or not, and whether they've set their RUBYOPT variable or not.

Note: line (B) will work from RubyGems 0.8+ but not RubyGems 0.7-.  That's
the idea.

Thanks for all the cool gems people have contributed.  Now that this
release is out, I'm going to contribute some myself :)

Some comments on other features:

* If your unit tests are in the 'test' directory of your project,
  and are all named 'tc_*.rb', then include this in your gemspec:

    spec.test_files = Dir.glob('test/tc_*.rb')

* If you have a test _suite_ file, which loads all the other tests,
  you can put this in instead:

    spec.test_file = 'test/test_suite.rb'

* If you have _several_ test suite files,

    spec.test_files = Dir.glob('test/ts_*.rb')

* The 'spec' and 'unpack' commands only work with _installed_ gems.
  I'll extend these commands to other gems for the next release.
  'unpack' is useful for taking a look inside a package.  For example,

     gem unpack rake

  will create the directory './rake-0.4.7', or whatever your latest
  installed versions is.

Remember to take a look at the "Package Management with RubyGems" chapter
from Pickaxe II, available at

  http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/

Remember also that RubyGems isn't the only game in town.  Mauricio is
doing a fine job with RPA.  The two projects overlap somewhat, but serve
slightly different purposes.  Please try to organise your code and project
so that it can be easily packaged into a gem, into the RPA, into a
Debian/RPM/ebuild/...  If you have any questions about this, fire away.

Cheers,
Gavin


Chad wrote:
> Marking the 3000th download of RubyGems
> (http://rubygems.rubyforge.org), we are pleased to announce the release
> of RubyGems 0.8.0! [........]