From: Trans <transfire@...>
Date: 2006-08-27T17:15:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Best practice? own libs


Patrick Gundlach wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to ask you for your recommendations. I
> develop (privately) a set of libraries which are used in several
> projects. Some of these I also want to share with others (i.e.
> distribute). When developing I use a directory structure such as
>
> lib/   <--- libraries here
> test/  <--- tests
> ..
>
> Now, when using the library from another project I either need to
>
> 1) put the above lib directory in $:, the search path
> 2) copy the needed libs to the project
> or
> 3) install the library in a system wide/private directory structure
>    and set the environment variable RUBYLIB.
>
> Of course I would always like to use the newest version of a lib.
>
>
> What do you guys recommend? Symlinks?

Depends on your needs. But #1 and #3 aren't portable. #2 is the right
choice hwne you don;t want to have you lib dependent on the
installation of another lib. In those cases I put the code in:
lib/vendor/, although I've seen other use lib/support/.

The 4th option, which is the typical general approach --the one for whn
it's okay to have an external dependency, is to install the library to
the a standard location. The $LOAD_PATH is already set to search these
locations depending on you Ruby installation. For instance, on Debian
the location is /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/. But really you don't
have to worry about that yourself if you just use an install script,
most noteably setup.rb (http://i.loveruby.net/en/projects/setup/), or
use the ruby-specific package manager, RubyGems.

HTH.

                                                 trans