[Rubygems-developers] RubyGems Alpha II?

[Gavin Sinclair]

On Wednesday, March 31, 2004, 12:57:51 AM, Chad wrote:

> Hello all,

>    I think it's about time that we release Alpha II of RubyGems.  We have
> created several new features since Alpha I, and it would be great to get
> people trying them out and providing feedback (the Alpha I release was
> extremely fruitful in getting you all to participate!):

Yeah, good idea.  There's just a few issues.

> * Installing "binary" gems from source 
> * Running gems' test suite on installation

I couldn't get this to work.  Jim reported --gen-rdoc problems.  I
broke it, basically, by being unaware of the data types involved.

> * Installing and managing multiple versions of applications (like Rake)

Heh, I didn't know this had been implemented.

> * Major cleanup of gem --options
> * Proxy support fixed/cleaned/finished

I can't get anything to work over my proxy at work.  I plead
ignorance, poor error messages, and suboptimal interface.  (Proxy
should "just work" if you have the env var set.)

> * gem command transparency for remote/local operations

Remote info is not implemented.  Not a showstopper for an Alpha II
release.

> There may be more that I'm not thinking of (my brain isn't working right
> yet).

 * config file support ('rdoc' and 'gempath' directives not yet
   implemented and should be)

> We obviously need to finish documenting all this stuff before releasing.

Yes.  What sort of format do you think?

> Anything else you all think we need before a release of Alpha II?

I vote we take advantage of a "release period" (i.e. feature freeze)
in order to clean up the code without changing behaviour.  Some simple
things like formatting, comments; and some complex things like making
it clear what is being returned by install (etc.) methods.

All this sounds like a timeline of 3-4 weeks.  Are there any other
features that people think we just must have before a release?

I'm looking forward to making all the documentation on the Wiki
describe the new interface.

Cheers,
Gavin