Hi-- A few days back I brought up some ideas for dealing with multi-packages. This evening I sat down and put to together a little tool to handle just that: gembundle.
The ideas is simple. Lets say I have a couple of gems: hello_world.gem and adios_world.gem. % gembundle build tryme hello_world-1.0.0.gem adios_world-1.0.0.gem This creates a tar.gz file called, tryme.gembundle which simply contains the two listed gems, Then... % gembundle install tryme.gembundle Successfully installed hello_world, version 1.0.0 Successfully installed adios_world, version 1.0.0 The intsall command just copies the bundle to a temp location, unpacks it and installs the contained gems (with the -y option). That's it. Of course, my script is just a quick prototype --I'm shelling out for all the tar and gem stuff. And it doesn't support some features like remote access for grabbing gems to bundle. But hopefully it doesn't matter b/c I wanted to see if others would approve of this functionality being incorporated into RubyGems itself. It's pretty straightforward. It would just mean adding a "bundle" command to the gem CLI and allowing the installer to recognize a bundle vs a regular gem,such that '.gem' could still be used instead '.gembundle'. So what is it good for? It gives large application developers breathing room to use vendor gems more freely. Per my explanation in my last post, installing a gem that has many dependencies can be off-putting. Not only does the administrator have to consider each dependency, but ensuring the right versions of each can be daunting as well. Gembundles take care these concerns. And since a bundle simply contains regular gems it works seamlessly with the current design. What do you think? Thanks, T. _______________________________________________ Rubygems-developers mailing list Rubygems-developers@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers
