[Rubygems-developers] Testing for Gems 0.9.0 Beta

[Jim Weirich]

Hi Tom,

I wanted to run some ideas by you.  One of the big changes scheduled for 
RubyGems 0.9.0 is how the gem command downloads the gem index from 
RubyForge.  Currently, gem grabs the entire wad of gem specs if it 
detects that the size of the index file has changed.  The new version 
will incrementally download only those gems that have been updated since 
the last download.  Hopefully this will cut down download bandwidth a 
bit and speed up the end user experience.

However, in order to support incremental index downloads, the index 
files for a gem repository need to be enhanced.  I've been running with 
an enhanced index on my beta gem site (http://onestepback.org/betagems) 
for some time.  The new index format is backwards compatible with the 
old software, so that people using older gem commands will still 
continue to work.

What I would like to do in the near future is give you the new indexing 
software to run on RubyForge.  After we verify that everything still 
works for the current gems, I will get a limited number of people to try 
out the beta gems with incremental downloading and begin to see how that 
works on a large site like RubyForge.  Once everything looks OK, we can 
proceed with a RubyGems release.

I think the above approach will get everything in place with the minimum 
disruption to the gem users.  I don't know how this will play with your 
mirror sites however.

What do you think?  Any feedback?

(Note:  Copied to the RubyGems-dev mailing list)

-- 
-- Jim Weirich       jweirich at one.net      http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)