[Rubygems-developers] Specifying equivalent modules?

[Eric Hodel]

On Apr 17, 2007, at 22:01, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> Jim Weirich wrote:
>> On 4/17/07, Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter at sun.com> wrote:
>>> Is there a way in RubyGems today to specify that one of a number of
>>> modules would be considered equivalent, and to load whichever is
>>> actually present? So that during install, options could be  
>>> presented for
>>> multiple named gems that provide the same functionality?
>>
>> Would it work to just make platform dependent variants of the gems in
>> question? Currently, RubyGems will make you manually choose the right
>> platform (future versions will autoselect the correct platform for
>> you).
>
> I think it's more than just choosing the right platform...it's an  
> issue
> that if every gem out there depends on "mongrel" there's not a  
> thing we
> can do to force them to install and run with "jmongrel", even if  
> the two
> are nearly identical.

No, they'd install the java platformed mongrel, much like there's a  
mswin and ruby platformed mysql gem.  Nothing changes in code  
anywhere, people running jruby instead install java gems.