From: Eric Hodel Date: 2009-04-15T06:27:03+09:00 Subject: Re: how do you manage your gems' gemspecs? On Apr 13, 2009, at 21:45, cldwalker wrote: > On Apr 13, 5:04 pm, Eric Hodel wrote: >> On Apr 9, 2009, at 20:00, ghorner wrote: >> >>> I'm curious how people manage creating their gemspecs. I'm not >>> asking for a flame war on gem creators i.e. hoe vs newgem vs >>> jeweler. >>> I'm just wondering if your gem creators encourage creating Rakefiles >>> with some gemspec configuration inside of it. If so, how do you do >>> this gem after gem and not get annoyed that you're not being DRY? >>> I ended up going with a solution where I generate all my gem's >>> gemspecs from one config file:http://github.com/cldwalker/dotfiles/blob/master/.gems.yml >>> . >> >> This makes it harder for other people to develop with your gems. Now >> they need two things in order to build your gems if they want to >> install a gem. > > My gem's build dependency is a config file containing file globs. This > is no more of an extra dependency than a manifest file or a Rakefile > with embedded file globs. Since my gem rebuilding doesn't depend on my > global config file, I'm not sure what two things you're referring to > and why it'd be harder for someone ... With what you've described, if I want to build a gem of yours from source, first I have to download the source for your project, then I have to go find your ~/.gems.yml, download it, then merge it into my ~/.gems.yml (if I was following your scheme) and keep them up to date when either my gems or your gems change. Having to download from a separate repository is an extra dependency. > Actually, when rebuilding my contributors would have one less > dependency: no gem creator dependency (i.e. no hoe or jeweler > dependency). Just with the rake task mentioned at the end of my post, > they could rebuild my gems. So if I don't need ~/.gems.yml, why do you need or have it? It seems to be a useless extra file. >> Using globs is a bad idea, you end up including files you don't want >> in your gem. A manifest file that gets automatically checked at >> release time solves this problem elegantly. > > Since I'd be generating my manifest file from a rake task using globs, > I'm not sure how manifest files help. There's no way to verify your glob is correct without manually checking it every release as it has no history to compare against. Using a glob, eventually you'll forget to release a file, or release files that shouldn't be there (I've worked on around 50 gems, and released a few hundred, and this happens with globs). A manifest file can ensure you won't have either problem. With a manifest file you can see what has been added or removed easily using diff. > If you're creating manifest files by hand, then that's a level of > file- > checking I personally don't want for every file change. I don't edit manifest files by hand, rm and patch takes care of it for me, rake check_manifest | patch will update a manifest file once I've verified it is correct. >>> I wrote more about my solution here: >>> http://tagaholic.me/2009/04/08/building-dry-gems-with-thor-and-jewele >>> ... >>> How do you manage your gems' gemspecs? >> >> I keep them per-project and largely generate them from the non- >> Rakefile: >> >> Hoe.new('gmail_contacts', GmailContacts::VERSION) do |p| >> p.rubyforge_name = 'seattlerb' >> p.developer 'Eric Hodel', 'drbr...@segment7.net' >> >> p.extra_deps << ['gdata', '~> 1.0'] >> p.extra_deps << ['nokogiri', '~> 1.2'] >> end >> >> description, summary, and homepage are all figured out for me from >> the >> README.txt > > Thanks for sharing. I prefer my gem metadata in an open format i.e. > yaml. I didn't realize ruby code and plain text files weren't an open format and required dependencies to use, unlike yaml which requires a fairly hefty dependency. What do you do when you add a major feature to your gem? By having your description and summary come from your README.txt you only have to update one place. With your setup you now have to update two things. Also, your summary and description are the same, which is wrong (looking at hirb): $ ri Gem::Specification [...] description (RW): A long description of this gem [...] summary (RW): A short summary of this gem's description. Displayed in `gem list -d`. [...] > Having to extract them from the readme and/or a Hoe or Jeweler > config just adds more work and dependencies. Looking at the rakefiles for your various projects, you've duplicated your tasks across them. What's going to happen when you want to update your tasks, find a better way of writing them or find a new tool (like flog or flay)? You're going to have to hand-merge each of your existing rakefiles with the new task. When you use a library to define your tasks you don't have to worry about this, you just install a newer version of the library and you're done. I've released a large number of gems and I can assure you your path of avoiding a library in the name of less work and fewer dependencies only leads only to more work and more suffering.