From: "Randy W. Sims" <RandyS@...>
Date: 2003-12-18T10:34:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie questions

On 12/17/2003 8:23 PM, Chad Fowler wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Randy W. Sims wrote:
> 
> # On 12/17/2003 12:30 AM, Weirich, James wrote:
> # > 
> # >>[...] I've also been pushing an update[3] of the META Specification[4] 
> # >>that CPAN is now being populated with.
> # >>
> # >>I'm curious as to whether you've considered meta data for ruby 
> # >>distributions,
> # > 
> # > 
> # > Yes.  It is stored as YAML in the RubyGem.
> # > 
> # 
> # I've looked briefly at RubyGem (and Rake). Looks great. I didn't find 
> # any reference to YAML yet; I was hoping to take a peek. Am I looking in 
> # the wrong place? I think it would be great if there was a common 
> # specification for meta data about distributions.
> # 
> 
> Hi Randy.
> 
>   When you say "distributions" are you talking about modules or Ruby 
> itself?  If you want to know more about ruby gems, try: 
> http://rubygems.rubyforge.org.  Let us know if you don't see what you're 
> looking for there.  The documentation is very much a work in progress.
> 
> Chad

Hi Chad,

I was referring to distributions. Both of the perl build tools MakeMaker 
and Module::Build produce a file, 'META.yml' that is placed inside of 
every module distribution on CPAN. The meta data is there for CPAN, 
PAUSE, and other tools easily gather information about module 
distributions to aid searching, indexing, etc. From looking at the site 
mentioned it looks like you keep that info in a ruby script 
<http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?GemSpecification>; not in 
YAML. Maybe I misunderstood James or he misunderstood me when I 
mentioned meta data?

Thanks,
Randy.