requirements for native gems not free text?

[Erik Hollensbe]

On Jan 26, 2013, at 10:14 AM, Evan Phoenix <evan at phx.io> wrote:

> See below. 
> 
> -- 
> Evan Phoenix // evan at phx.io
> 
> 
> On Saturday, January 26, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Jordi Massaguer Pla wrote:
> 
>> Does this mean we could have something like:
>> 
>> metadata["linux_requirements"] = ["libMagick.so >= 6.6.2"]
> Yes, that's correct. 
>> 
>> where can I find more information on the metadata?
> 
> We haven't written many docs on it yet, but here is some: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/blob/master/lib/rubygems/specification.rb#L23-L35  

About two years ago Josiah Kiehl and I were working on a system that abused this metadata to provide a way for users to build/install their dependencies during "gem install". We didn't get that far code-wise (both of us moved cross-country shortly after that), but we did have a pretty good idea of how we wanted to do it. Happy to discuss it off-list if you're interested in what we came up with.

-Erik