From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-05-01T08:35:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Opportunities and pitfalls; was "Introducing myself - Sascha Ebach"

[snip]
> 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

The installer that I'm thinking of would install Ruby itself, and extra 
libraries, not just extensions. I think that a sort of meta-gem that 
only has dependencies could easily be a part of it, though... after 
installing ruby, rubygems, some gui toolkits, etc, it could run a gem 
that installs some important development items like RedCloth, etc...

I didn't get the idea that rubygems would ever be something that you 
would use to install anything other than ruby libraries, but maybe I 
was mistaken?

--Mark