On Jun 3, 2008, at 18:17 , Donavan Pantke wrote:
The :install flag is required for gems that have specific loading
requirements, and so cannot have dependencies automatically
activated. The
biggest use case is Passenger, which can activate multiple versions
of Rails.
It originally required rails in the gemspec (as it needs some
version of
Rails), but that meant that when the passenger gem activated, rails
automatically activated as well. That caused passenger to blow up
when trying
to activate a different version of Rails. Having the :install flag
will allow
Passenger to be loaded but let Passenger worry about Rails.
Biggest use-case, or only use-case? I suspect it is the latter and as
such think that adding it is more confusing than leaving it out. It is
incredibly hard to explain (this thread is evidence) and I can easily
imagine it being misused more than it helps.
Passenger is very very edge-case to most ruby projects out there. Eric
is doing a damn good job of stripping out a ton of cruft from rubygems
and making things a lot more clear, both internally and for users. I'd
like to see some real need for a feature before it goes into rubygems.
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