From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2007-01-11T01:16:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Tattle - The Ruby Census

On Jan 10, 2007, at 07:57, James Edward Gray II wrote:
> On Jan 10, 2007, at 9:51 AM, Eric Hodel wrote:
>
>> The problem is in RubyGems not allowing you the ability to  
>> distinguish between run-time dependencies and build-time  
>> dependencies.
>
> This is an interesting idea.  Can you explain how this would help?   
> What would RubyGems do with the two different kinds of  
> dependencies?  How would it end up that we wouldn't just have the  
> combined list installed on all systems?

For example, FreeBSD's ports has these two types of dependencies, but  
uses them slightly differently than RubyGems would need.

FreeBSD gives you the option of installing a pre-built package or  
building from source.  An image manipulation tool might require  
libpng to run, but to be built from source it would also need libtool  
and autoconf.

If you install the package only libpng is installed on your system.

If you install from source then libpng, libtool and autoconf are  
installed.  You can remove autoconf and libtool at your leisure and  
nobody cares.

For RubyGems you might have run-time dependencies (rails needs rake,  
activerecord, actionpack, ...) and build-time (or developer)  
dependencies (FasterCSV needs rake if you want to run the tests or  
add features or fix bugs).  By default RubyGems would not install  
build-time dependencies.

-- 
Eric Hodel - drbrain@segment7.net - http://blog.segment7.net

I LIT YOUR GEM ON FIRE!