From: Hugh Sasse <hgs@...>
Date: 2005-10-06T02:47:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Gems is over engineered

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Trans wrote:

> Interesting brainstorming Hugh.

Thank you.
>
> I think it may help if we break this down to the fundamentals. Imagine
> if we had no $LOAD_PATH. Imagine we had to spell everything out in
> absolutes. But we don't know where exactly our files are going to end
> up on the end system. How do we account for this? Well, we need a map
> --a map of aliases my scripts will use to refer to it's contents (and
> others can use to refer to it) that point to actual locations.

Completely agree...
>
> I've worked out a partial solution. I'll release it soon. But it only
> does the mapping internally for the lib/ dir. To go beyond that really
> means modifying Ruby to handle this more gracefully as well as adding a
> tool to help generate distribution specific maps based on the alias map
> provided by the developers.

Yes, it would have to be part of Ruby itself.  Bringing it into the
whole Object hierarchy would probably allow some really fun things
to happen.  For example, one of the Repackager's problems is how to
distribute the files over a heterogeneous network, with machines
having different architectures.  Well, if one can get documentation
and libraries by calling some methods, they could be overridden to
get the objects (files?) from a server instead.  How far could one
reduce Ruby so that only the networking-with-authentication code ran
locally, and the rest of the language was grabbed from the server?
Stdlib in a TupleSpace.....?

>
> In essense giving Ruby a file registry system.

Yes, though I'd want to avoid the word "registry" because of how
Microsoft have given the term associations: "Do Not Touch",
"Danger[, Will Robinson]!" :-)
>
> T.
>
         Thank you,
         Hugh