[Rubygems-developers] gem format

[Mauricio Fernández]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 06:19:29PM -0400, Jim Weirich wrote:
> I have no problem with changing the format.  Here are a couple of points ...
> 
> (1) We need to rev the gem format.  The gem format revision should 
> explicitly be part of the file, and we should be able to detect the 
> revision given an gem file of unknown format.  This gem format revision 
> is separate from the gem software revision.

The new format could be versioned easily. The gem format can be specified
either in the metadata section or as a separate entry in the "outer
container".

> (2) Old revisions need to be supported, at least for a time.  I know our 
> software is currently beta, but we have over 50 individual projects 
> available as gems right now.  If changing the format of the file 
> disrupts this, I think this would be a PR failure.

You could drop write support for the old format and just keep the
ability to read it.

> (3) Yes, please, whatever you do, get rid of the ruby code at the front 
> of the gem file.

This is also a must if you plan to implement package signatures.

> (4) The tar/gzip utilities donated by Mauricio ... are they portable 
> across all our platforms?

The code has been tested on several Linux distributions, FreeBSD,
different flavors of win32 and OSX.

I have read builder.rb & format.rb and I think this won't take too much
work. I will prepare a preliminary patch.

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