From: Alan Chen <alan@...>
Date: 2002-09-10T08:00:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Multiple .rb versions support

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 07:18:20AM +0900, Chris Morris wrote:
> > In general, I don't like seeing versioning managed in the filesystem,
> > because it adds alot of clutter.
> >
> > What is the problem that this functionality would solve?
> >
> > Please humor me, I've just never had a problem with Ruby that begged
> > for integrated versioning.
>
> .Net has a way of supporting multiple versions of assemblies (.dlls,
> essentially) to avoid DLL-Hell, a common Windows problem with multiple
> programs overwriting shared .dlls (like msvcrt.dll) in the system directory.
> 
> Chris

I have three comments so far:

You could also look at how linux distributions version their .so
files. It's been used and working much longer than .NET has been
around. (Although the linux way somewhat depends on the fs sanely
supporting symlinks.)

Instead of implicit naming schemes in the file path, maybe you should
just add an optional parameter or two to require (or introduce
vrequire). What the backend does to locate and store files can be
completely transparent to the user. The same with the logic to install
ruby libraries. You would have mkmf install targets automatically
handle backend versioning schemes.

I'm still not sure its worth the work.  How would you resolve libraries
depending on libraries of conflicting versions?  Wouldn't the module
and class constants from different versions collide?

- alan

-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata LLC
http://digikata.com