From: Joshua Haberman <joshua@...>
Date: 2005-10-03T05:08:38+09:00
Subject: Re: why can't Ruby load .gem files directly?

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On Oct 1, 2005, at 10:25 PM, Jim Weirich wrote:
> On Sunday 02 October 2005 12:27 am, Joshua Haberman wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure what you mean by that.  Could you elaborate (or point me
>> to documentation that provides more detail about this problem)?
>>
>
> If you have a shared library embedded in your gem file, how do you  
> point your
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable at it so that the OS knows  
> about it.
> Not only is a hard problem to solve, it is a hard problem that must
> (potentially) be solved differently on each platform.

Yes, I can definitely see that loading a shared library packaged  
inside a gem is not going to work.

So why not have shared libraries live in their own files in the gem  
directory?

my-gem-dir/
my-gem-dir/foo-1.2.gem
my-gem-dir/foo-1.2-libfoo.so
my-gem-dir/foo-1.2-libbar.so
my-gem-dir/baz-0.3.gem

The gem could specify what shared libraries need to be loaded (or you  
could pattern match on file names -- eg. load "foo-1.2*.so")

Yes, that would mean that packages containing C extensions would no  
longer be one single gem file, but luckily we have tar to help with  
that.

Josh

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