On Oct 11, 2007, at 23:32 , Prashant Srinivasan wrote:
> I'm hoping to get rubygems bundled with the OpenSolaris OS, and  have
> some questions about rubygems compatibility/stability etc., which I
> couldn't find direct answers to.  Any thoughts/pointers are most
> appreciated.

Cool.  I hope it will be possible for people to upgrade RubyGems upon  
new RubyGems releases.

> -> Are rubygems versions compatible with previous releases(or previous
> minor releases . . . or previous point releases)?

We've made a best effort to keep RubyGems backwards and forwards  
compatible across all releases, but sometimes we've made mistakes.

RubyGems versioning scheme seems nonexistent, so I don't know what  
the distinction has been between minor and teeny releases.

Sometimes features become deprecated over the course of at least two  
releases before being removed.  Kernel#require_gem has been  
deprecated, Time::today has been marked for deprecation, and will  
warn on the next release.

> -> are certain releases labeled "development releases".  ie., like  
> in Ruby?

There are occasional beta releases, but there are never development  
releases like in Ruby.

> -> Does the integration into Ruby 1.9 mean that rubygems will  
> follow the  same concept of development and production releases  
> that Ruby[3] does?

No.  RubyGems may have releases independent of Ruby.  Bundled  
RubyGems versions will not contain experimental features.

> -> Stability of the gem format is implied in [1].  Will the gem format
> be stable across a set of versions of rubygems?  If yes, what's the
> range of versions across the format will remain stable?

There are no plans to change the format of gems.  (Of course, there  
may be bugs.)

> -> It seems that the repository format changed in an incompatible way,
> in a certain release[2].  This was worked around by having install.rb
> migrate the repository to the new format.  I'm curious if other  
> changes
> in the repository format are imminent . . . and if they are, are we
> planning to provide migration programs?

No repository format changes are planned.  If any are necessary,  
we'll provide a migration tool.

--
Poor workers blame their tools. Good workers build better tools. The
best workers get their tools to do the work for them. -- Syndicate Wars


_______________________________________________
Rubygems-developers mailing list
[email protected]
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers

Reply via email to