[Rubygems-developers] Specifying equivalent modules?

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

Thomas Palmer wrote:
> But as Tim Hunter pointed out for RMagick, there's some value in people 
> knowing that they don't have the real thing if feature parity isn't 
> there (or big bugs are). So I'll follow his recommendation for now (even 
> if there's no official trademark on RMagick - which you could argue 
> infringes on ImageMagick anyway) with respect to my clone.

Well, I suppose the problem with this logic is that no interpreter in 
the world can run both RMagick and RMagickJr at the same time. You can 
either run one or the other, but not both. So saying that C or JRuby 
users might want to ensure they have the "real thing" doesn't really 
apply...the "real thing" for JRuby users won't work at all, and the 
Java-based version won't work for C Ruby users.

Keep in mind this largely just applies to cases where we have a Java 
port of a C-extension-based gem...those cases present zero conflict 
between platforms, so the only "real thing" is the one that will 
actually work...

- Charlie