From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2009-06-05T06:55:59+09:00
Subject: Re: why is require 'rubygems' sometimes needed?

On Jun 4, 2009, at 14:20, Markus Fischer wrote:
> Justin Collins wrote:
>> Just as a note (as your question has already been answered),  
>> requiring
>> rubygems is no longer needed in Ruby 1.9.
>
> How so? I.e., what has been changed that the libraries are  
> automatically
> found?

RubyGems is built-in.

> Because currently, with 1.8.7, I think I had some troubles getting my
> code portable.

require 'rubygems' returns false in 1.9, indicating that RubyGems is  
already loaded.  If you want code that runs on both, keep require  
'rubygems' around.

> On my home machine, I've installed rubyzip through gem and thus I
> required rubygems. On another machine, rubyzip was installed with a
> distribution specific mechanism and there were no rubygems at all  
> installed.
>
> How would I tackle this problem? Would I need rescue the rubygem  
> require
> statement? Are there elegant solutions for this?


Since you probably needed other software that came from RubyGems,  
there's no reason to rescue the require on RubyGems.