Sorry this has taken so long.
I pondered long and hard over the datadir issue and finally decide to
take a minimalist approach verify similar to Maruicio's first suggestion
in http://tinyurl.com/b7yo9. I am suggesting that people use
Config.datadir(package_name) to locate their data directory. In the
absence of RubyGems, this will just resolve to
File.join(Config::CONFIG['datadir'], package_name). If RubyGems is
present, it will locate the 'data' directory in the corresponding
versioned gem area.
This has several real advantages:
* It is compatible with setup.rb (where the data directory defaults to
'data'). A project can use a single directory structure to satisfy both
the gem and setup.rb packaging requirements.
* The application remains unaware whether it is running as a gem or a
directly installed app.
* It retains versioned data directories so that we don't break the
multi-version nature of RubyGems.
The biggest downside is that Ruby does not natively support the
Config.datadir() method. I will propose this on the Ruby-core list if
it passes muster here. Until we get native support, anyone wishing to
take advantage of the datadir method will have to include the following
file with their application.
module Config
unless Config.respond_to?(:datadir)
# Return the path to the data directory associated with the given
# package name. Normally this is just
# "#{Config::CONFIG['datadir']}/#{package_name}", but may be
# modified by packages like RubyGems to handle versioned data
# directories.
def Config.datadir(package_name)
File.join(CONFIG['datadir'], package_name)
end
end
end
Notice that is carefully checks for an existing datadir method, so if it
does become available natively in Ruby, this file will degrade gracefully.
Thoughts?
On a second issue, we were contacted sometime back by an Apple
representative asking for a clarification of the RubyGems license. I've
gone ahead and included the Ruby license (suitably modified for
RubyGems) and the GPL (as referenced in the Ruby license) in the
distribution, as was discussed at that time. I also added copyright
notices to each file, and referenced the LICENSE.txt file for details of
any permissions.
As to who to reference in the copyright notice, I listed explicitly the
three Rubyforge project Administrators for the RubyGems project, (that
would be Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer and me) and appended the phrase "and
others" to cover all the contributions from the many people that have
contributed over the years. I don't want anyone to feel slighted by
this, so if there are significant contributions that you would like to
have called out, just let me know and will will add additional copyright
notices on the appropriate files. (Mauricio's copyright notice in
package.rb was left as is).
Any questions?
I'll make a beta version soon and hopefully we can get a 0.9.0 release
out very soon.
-- Jim Weirich
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