From: Rick DeNatale Date: 2009-10-03T06:45:30+09:00 Subject: Re: Having a gem for 1.8 and 1.9 On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 1:00 PM, (RK) Sentinel wrote: > This is a simple query ... I am back after a long hiatus so have > forgotten some basics of gem creation. > >   1.      I am porting my gem from 1.8 to 1.9. >      I suppose if I just create a new version of the gem, it will not > be clear to a user when installing which version he should install. >      Should I create 2 separate gems (2 separate names??) or use a 1.9 > suffix to my gem. (rbcurse and rbcurse19) If possible, I think it's best to attempt to make 1 gem which works on both. It's easier for a pure Ruby gem than one with C extensions. This means that you need to restrict the use of 1.9 feature inside the gem, and have a good test suite which you can run against 1.8 and 1.9. For my RiCal gem, I test against the latest 1.8.6, 1.8.7, and 1.9. I've found a very few cases where I needed to write different code for 1.8 vs 1.9 because of the differences in Strings, but I've been able to conditionally select which implementation of a few methods get "compiled" by testing the ruby version inline. -- Rick DeNatale Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale