[Rubygems-developers] HEADSUP RubyGems 1.2 Real Soon Now

[Ryan Davis]

On Jun 3, 2008, at 18:17 , Donavan Pantke wrote:

> The :install flag is required for gems that have specific loading
> requirements, and so cannot have dependencies automatically  
> activated. The
> biggest use case is Passenger, which can activate multiple versions  
> of Rails.
> It originally required rails in the gemspec (as it needs some  
> version of
> Rails), but that meant that when the passenger gem activated, rails
> automatically activated as well. That caused passenger to blow up  
> when trying
> to activate a different version of Rails. Having the :install flag  
> will allow
> Passenger to be loaded but let Passenger worry about Rails.

Biggest use-case, or only use-case? I suspect it is the latter and as  
such think that adding it is more confusing than leaving it out. It is  
incredibly hard to explain (this thread is evidence) and I can easily  
imagine it being misused more than it helps.

Passenger is very very edge-case to most ruby projects out there. Eric  
is doing a damn good job of stripping out a ton of cruft from rubygems  
and making things a lot more clear, both internally and for users. I'd  
like to see some real need for a feature before it goes into rubygems.