[Rubygems-developers] Version number format

[Jamis Buck]

Chad Fowler wrote:

> I'm still liking the captcha-snapshot idea better, but the lovely thing 
> here is that we don't *have* to specify a policy on this.  RubyGems will 
> support several options, and it could be managed on a library-by-library 
> basis.

I would like the -snapshot option best, too, but only if I didn't have 
to require the game with the -snapshot suffix explicitly.  What if 
rubygems were to recognize the -snapshot suffix? You would "require_gem" 
as usual, but rubygems would know to look for matching -snapshot 
directories first.

The drawback here is you can't have multiple snapshots of the same gem 
installed simultaneously... though, that's not such a big deal.  I can't 
think of any reason why you would want multiple snapshots installed at 
the same time, except to compare functionality.

Another option: what if there were a "snapshot" property of the gem that 
could be set in the gemspec? Any gem with that property would be ignored 
when considering an upgrade, unless a specific option were set on the 
command-line saying that you wanted to upgrade a snapshot... too 
complicated? Something like this could work with a variety of different 
snapshot scenarious.

-- 
Jamis Buck
jgb3 at email.byu.edu
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis

ruby -h | ruby -e 
'a=[];readlines.join.scan(/-(.)\[e|Kk(\S*)|le.l(..)e|#!(\S*)/) {|r| a << 
r.compact.first };puts "\n>#{a.join(%q/ /)}<\n\n"'