[Erector-devel] Be careful with gemspec dependencies when depending on ActiveSupport...

[Chad Woolley]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Steve Conover <sconover at gmail.com> wrote:
> You could, at the very least, have a very narrow dependency into
> ActiveSupport.  There are a couple tricks to this and Ben understands
> them.

Therein lies unresolvable circular dependencies, unless you are careful.

If Erector gem depends on ActiveSupport, will you make it a dependency
in the gem (e.g. for use outside of rails)?  If so, what version spec
of ActiveSupport will you depend on in the Erector gemspec?

Now, say you use Erector as part of Rails.  You activate Rails version
X, which automatically activates ActiveSupport version X.  Then you
activate the Erector gem.  If the Erector gem spec specifies a version
of ActiveSupport which is not satisfied by version X, then you have an
unresolvable dependency.

This is what happened when mislav-will_paginate used to depend on ActiveSupport.

If you only anticipate Erector to be used in Rails, then just don't
specify a dependency on ActiveSupport, and you'll be fine (you'll use
whatever version Rails already loaded)

-- Chad