From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2010-12-12T05:18:46+09:00
Subject: Re: The Ruby Lockdown

On Dec 10, 2010, at 04:53, Intransition wrote:
> Is Ruby is getting further and further locked in to a specific set of
> tools and libraries and if you don't use those tools you are a second
> class citizen?
> 
> Case in point:
> 
>  https://github.com/erikh/rubygems-test/issues/issue/2/#comment_601820
> 
> While I realize Rake is the mainstream choice, I have been
> successfully using an alternate system for years.

I have an archive of every latest gem install that is a few months old, let's see how many gems contain a Rakefile:

$ find . -depth 1 -name "*tgz" | wc -l
   17066
$ for gem in `find . -depth 1 -name "*tgz"`; do tar tzqf $gem "*/Rakefile" 2>/dev/null; done | wc -l
   12027

70% of gems are released with a Rakefile.  If the remaining 30% of gems that don't have a Rakefile all run tests the exact same way I would be shocked and surprised.

Currently nobody uses `gem install -t` nor `gem test`, so it is being removed from RubyGems so that a dedicated maintainer can quickly improve it.  I've spoken to Erik on possible future developments of rubygems-test as eventually it may be integrated back into RubyGems.

In the future Erik plans to switch to a plugin system which will allow test frameworks to plug in to rubygems-test much like they plug in to autotest.

The purpose of this first-edition is to grow the userbase without locking himself into supporting code he wishes to replace in the future.

I think it's reasonable for Erik to consider projects that don't use Rake, which ships with Ruby, as second-class and unsupported at this time.