Here's the Pull Request and commit that introduced the change. https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/pull/1371
The Pull Request shows that the purpose of the change is to fix a memory allocation issue. On large projects with a number of Rubygems it can reduce String allocations by nearly 50%. I think this is an acceptable bug fix with respect to SemVer. Additionally, SemVer is around versioning of the public API. As the Gem specification source that is generated by Rubygems is not actually part of the public API, I don't even think SemVer applies. Modifying them (via sed, no less) is akin to monkey-patching private methods, which is not covered by SemVer. May I suggest that instead of using sed against the source, which could potentially corrupt the file into invalid Ruby, that we use Ruby to parse Ruby itself? Since the file is valid Ruby, Ripper could be use to parse the source, manipulate the S-expressions, and then emit the valid, modified Ruby. This feels more forward-compatible in the long run. Jason _______________________________________________ ruby-sig mailing list -- ruby-sig@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to ruby-sig-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
