From: Ryan Leavengood <mrcode@...>
Date: 2001-10-30T07:50:34+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23769] RubyGems Status (was: Re: Some inspirations from REBOL)

> Any news on RubyGems? I'm not pushing you just wanting a status report
> since I consider it one of the most important things the community
needs
> to get done...

Well sometimes I need some pushing :)

Unfortunately I haven't been able to get much time lately to work on
RubyGems, but this week I should be able to get some time.  I think part
of my problem is that I keep thinking of new things that I can do and
then I want to implement that before I release, hehe.  But as Chad
Fowler has told me many times I just need to get it on CVS and make a
quick release so that people can start playing with it.  I'm sure no one
expects it to be perfect when it is first released (well no one but me
;)

To peak your interest some of the new features I've been thinking about
is:

- version based requiring (as per the recent emails concerning NQXML
versions)

Ex: require 'nqxml/streamingparser', 1.1.1

- directly running RubyGems (like java -jar)

Ex: rg_run SomeGem-1.0.0.0.rbg

The idea is that there will be a metadata element that indicates the
file that has the main program, and RubyGems will modify $0 then eval
that file inside the gem.  This way the idiomatic "if $0 == __FILE__"
stuff can just be used like it normally would.

For now there will be a separate script (rg_run) to run the gems, but
I'm sure we could add support to the ruby executable itself for this
(ruby -gem ?)  I believe Matz expressed some interest in this.

But for the sake of the release I will postpone adding that (and the
version stuff) until later.  Look for the release sometime this week
(hopefully I'll keep my word this time.)

Ryan Leavengood