[Rubygems-developers] Local installation w/deps (or, So I'm writing a Tinderbox...)

[Eric Hodel]

Well, Evan Phoenix wrote the Tinderbox web site and I've built (most  
of) the gem runner.  Maybe next week we'll have it all put together.

The basic idea is to install a gem into a sandbox (with  
dependencies), run the gem's tests, then post the results of the  
tests on a website to the shame of all who failed to make their tests  
pass.  (Maybe I'll even add a couple of leaderboards, including "most  
assertions" and "most dooomed".)  Anyhow...

My main issue is installing gems.  I flushed out a few bugs I found  
in Rubygems related to installing gems in a sandbox and have fixed  
those.

Now I have the problem of the discontinuity between local and remote  
installation.  Remote installation automatically installs all  
dependencies.  Local installation only installs the named gem.

I don't want to fetch every gem every time over the internet.  That's  
just not nice.

I don't want to re-write the three or four methods in RemoteInstaller  
that handle dependencies into Tinderbox::GemRunner.

So, what's the plan to unify the two?  I have the motivation,  
interest, and time.  I imagine the stupid-simple version would take  
about a day.

Oh, instead, can I do something fancy with the gems in the cache  
dir?  If a file lives there does rubygems skip a trip out to the  
internet?  (I haven't looked, its late and the idea just popped into  
my head.)

And one more thing.

Tinderbox::GemRunner copies the source_cache from the host gem  
repository into the sandbox to cut down on source_cache fetches, but  
I still see a lot of them.  Sometimes even back-to-back.  Is there  
something in Rubygems I should be poking at to make this go away?

Should Rubygems ever do a bulk update once it has a source_cache?

-- 
Eric Hodel - drbrain at segment7.net - http://blog.segment7.net
This implementation is HODEL-HASH-9600 compliant

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