From: Alex LeDonne <aledonne.listmail@...>
Date: 2007-01-11T06:45:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Tattle - The Ruby Census

On 1/10/07, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/10/07, Alex LeDonne <aledonne.listmail@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/10/07, Eric Hodel <drbrain@segment7.net> wrote:
> > > You fixed this the wrong way.  The problem is in RubyGems not
> > > allowing you the ability to distinguish between run-time dependencies
> > > and build-time dependencies.
> > I'm having a hard time with terminology.
>
> Eric means run-time dependencies and idempotency dependencies. Hoe is
> required so that someone could take an existing installed gem and
> package or repackage it just like the original author does. That's
> idempotency.

Austin-

Thank you - that explains a lot. I did not understand (nor could I
find documented) that idempotency was a design goal of hoe.

I think the discussion came about because some administrators would
consider that a mis-feature for production deployment, and hence the
hoe dependency was unexpected. This may also explain why there has not
been a clamor for idempotency meta-data in RubyGems; it's not a
well-explored or popular use case.

Perhaps a future enhancement to hoe would allow for deploy-only
(non-idempotent) gemspec construction.

-Alex