From: Chad Fowler <chad@...>
Date: 2004-05-01T06:52:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Opportunities and pitfalls; was "Introducing myself - Sascha Ebach"


On 30/4/2004, at 3:41 PM, Mark Hubbart wrote:

>
> On Apr 30, 2004, at 11:57 AM, Curt Hibbs wrote:
>
>>> Anyone want to help with that? :) I need to get on the stick and
>>> produce something on that.
>>
>> You should consider joining existing projects that are already 
>> working on
>> these problems.
>>
>> For example, the RubyGems project is all about packaging up Ruby 
>> libraries
>> and applications and installing them from remote or local 
>> repositories in a
>> manner that is dead simple. It can install packages that are pure 
>> Ruby,
>> binary Ruby extensions, and it can build and install extensions from 
>> source.
>
> This is good for ruby extensions... I eagerly await the point in time 
> where gems are given the same status as other installed libraries, and 
> require_gem goes away. I can see nothing but good stuff up ahead for 
> rubygems. :) But that isn't what I was talking about: rubygems will be 
> nice for *after* you get things installed. I want people to be able to 
> package up their own ruby 'distro', including the best tools and their 
> dependencies.
>

You could actually use RubyGems to create a distro like this.   There's 
no reason you can't create a "super gem" that does nothing but list 
dependencies.  So, for example, you could create a package for your 
favorite XML tools and call it hubbart-xml.   All it would do is depend 
on all of the gems (including versions, if you like) that you want to 
include, and those would be auto-installed when you install 
hubbart-xml.  Then, of course, you could package several such meta-gems 
into a "super gem", say "hubbart-big-enchilada" that would cause all of 
your favorite stuff to get installed with the simple command:

gem -Ri hubbart-big-enchilada

or (if you distributed the gem file):

ruby hubbart-big-enchilada-1.0.0.gem

Chad