From: Jon Cairns <lists@...>
Date: 2013-02-06T18:48:36+09:00
Subject: Expanding gemspecs

Hi everyone, I've got a question about the existence or potential
usefulness of a particular gem.

The situation is this: all gems have a gemspec file that defines various
properties about the gem. When creating a new gem with bundler, it puts
in some shortcuts to generating that information, such as using git to
list files in the gem, requiring a file and class constant to retrieve
the version number and using grep to discover test files.

This is great during development, but has a slight performance effect
for the end user when loading the gem. Multiply that by 20, 30, 40+ and
you start to get a noticeable delay when loading all gems (particularly
noticeable when starting rails).

So far I haven't said anything new: this has been brought up before and,
as far as I know, there isn't a universal solution yet. Some people
create Rake tasks to build their gemspecs, but what about a gem? E.g. a
command line tool to produce a fully qualified gemspec from a template.
I think that Jeweller used to do it, but that's no longer maintained as
people tend towards using bundler now.

Is there a gem in existence that parses the gemspec, producing an
expanded version that can then be used when packaging and delivering the
gem? A quick Google search returned nothing, so I wrote a small script
to do it. I was toying with the idea of turning it into a gem, but
wanted to pass it under the noses of seasoned rubyists to see what the
general feeling was.

Any thoughts?

Cheers, Jon :)

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