From: Chad Fowler Date: 2003-12-18T11:49:08+09:00 Subject: Re: Newbie questions On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Randy W. Sims wrote: # 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. hehe. "When I said 'distributions', I meant '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 # ; The Ruby script is really a pre-YAML form. You specify the gem spec in Ruby, but it generates YAML when you actually create the gem. We didn't want to have to hand-code YAML, since it's much easier to generate YAML from Ruby objects. So, the Ruby you see is a generator for the real metadata format. Chad