From: Tobias Luetke Date: 2005-04-18T08:53:03+09:00 Subject: Re: All Quiet on the Western Front: Is Rails overshadowing Ruby? > I think versioning is great, but maybe RubyGems went a little overboard > in separating itself from tradtional methodologies. For instance, was > it really neccessary to make binaries indirect loads? Why could Gems > have not installed libs to the standard location and just kept track of > what it put there? Versions could have been handled via directory > stucture and symlinks to the latest version. Then it would make sense > to have a #require_version method. No. This is just not how versions are used in reality. I'm absolutely puzzled by the amount of negative press gem receives for this immensely useful feature! I use require_gem all over the place to tie applications to versions. For example one production server is running 6 different rails applications, 4 of which are tied to specific older releases of gems, redcloth and others. Versioned libraries aren't a neat feature, they are absolutely required for everyone who is serious about ruby. Please don't talk this feature down because it doesn't look nice in your cron scripts.... -- Tobi http://www.snowdevil.ca - Snowboards that don't suck http://www.hieraki.org - Open source book authoring http://blog.leetsoft.com - Technical weblog