From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2010-05-19T00:04:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Bundler Groups

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Intransition <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:

> Considering the examples given in that article, I wonder if it isn't
> getting confused with *optional dependencies*. For example, database
> adapters are generally optional. The article says Rails puts mysql and
> pg in a db group, but why would they not be in their own groups? Why
> would I want both installed in on a production machine to begin with?
> Doesn't make sense to me.

That's talking about Rails itself. If you are contributing to the
Rails codebase you certainly want to run its test suite. In particular
the suite of Active Record, which involves SQLite, MySQL, and
PostgreSQL.

A Rails application has in its generated Gemfile only the adapter of
the database it has been generated for.

On the other hand, if you want to patch the Rails API via docrails, or
are working on guides, you do not need to setup the databases, nor to
install the database adapters. In that case you may tell bundler not
to include that group and you're done. That's a use case for groups.