From: Florian Gilcher <flo@...>
Date: 2009-06-09T22:15:06+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] nokogiri 1.3.0 Released - still a problem


On Jun 9, 2009, at 10:05 AM, Marcin Raczkowski wrote:

> Old discusion. But my 2$ ;)
>
> If you deploy to for example boxed environment, or host that does  
> have ruby but don't have rubygems, or project requires that all  
> dependencies (gems in this case) be unpacked and stored in svn/git.  
> You might find that his little `require 'rubygems'` suddenly breaks  
> application deployed into production.
>
> It's a host responsibility to provide library, whatever way it sees  
> fit - rubygems is just one option.
>


I would consider this an edge-case, especially because it is easily  
fixed by supplying an empty file named "rubygems.rb" somewhere inside  
the load-path, essentially turning `require 'rubygems'` into a noop.

The real "problem" in this is the fact that rubygems also provides the  
only common way of expressing a dependency via the `gem` method, which  
would then break. So, either we had a generic, gem-independent way of  
expressing "i want to require library X in version Y" (which we don't  
have) or the library maintainer would not be allowed to use gem -  
possibly breaking the library silently in a multitude of setups. I  
think it is a library responsibility to express the environment in  
which it is able to run.

I guess this status quo is okay.

Regards,
Florian Gilcher

--
Florian Gilcher

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