Hey Keenan, thanks for replying :-)

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:48 PM, Keenan Brock <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello Michel,
>
> I think this is a great example of heroku being ahead of their time.
>
> When .gems was introduced, there wasn't a way to specify gem dependencies in
> a ruby project.
> Back then, dependencies were a mess - heroku even had to run their own
> custom fork of rails.

There were other means to define dependencies (for instance, Bundler
was initially inspired by this library:
https://github.com/djanowski/dependencies). I think Heroku's solution
was very elegant, and continues to be.

>
> Now, the Gemfile is a common and standard way of specifying dependencies.
> There is a whole community adding features and documenting implications and
> nuances.

It is true that there wasn't a standard before Bundler. What I think,
and I guess most people will disagree with me, is that even though
Bundler was imposed upon every Rails developer, it doesn't mean it is
the standard for the rest of the Ruby community. Sure, I could go
along with the masses and adopt Bundler, but it feels wrong because it
is way out of my workflow. Bundler is a very big dependency, I don't
like the idea of it being imposed on me. Just for reference, this is
the tool we use for managing dependencies at the company I work for:
https://github.com/twpil/dep

> It makes sense for heroku to drop their proprietary tool and go with the
> common one, no?
> That way they can dedicate their resources on other great stuff to give to
> us.

It may makes sense for Heroku, I really don't know if they will lose
clients by dropping support for the .gems manifest. I don't have the
power to avoid that from happening, sadly. If it were up to me, I
would stick to the minimalism of the .gems manifest and also support
Gemfile, given that most of the applications deployed to Heroku are
built with Rails.

Thanks!

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