Hi Eric, hi all, I have a question not about developing, but about using rubygems. Sorry if it is kind of offtopic. But this question can be only answered by real rubygems gurus.
USECASE: working on an own fork of a ruby gem Imagine, you are using a particular gem within your application and found some bug or missing feature and wish to improve the gem. The source code of a gem is hosted at github. So it is easy to clone the source code. What next? I've tried following approaches. All of them are either cumbersome or error prone or both: ## Repeatedly reinstall 1. uninstall the current gem version `sudo gem uninstall foo` 2. switch to my version `cd myversion_of_foo` 3. edit the source code (apply the changes) 4. create a gem from my sources `rake gem` 5. install my version of the gem `sudo gem install pkg/foo-1.0.0.gem` 6. try out in connection with my (bigger) project 7. repeat all the steps for each change OK, one should work on a feature in a test-driven way and in isolation, which should reduce the amount of install/uninstall iterations, but still ... ## symbolic links 1. install the gem 2. goto to the system wide folder for installed gems `cd /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/foo-1.0.0` 3. remove or backup the lib folder `rm -rf lib` 4. create a symbolic link to your implementation's lib folder Editing the source code of the gem will have an immediate effect on the using application. ## load path explicitly change the load path in the client application `$:.unshift 'myversion_of_foo/lib'` or put a require statement with explicit full path. Now imagine there is a chain of libraries with dependencies ClientApp -> A -> B -> C -> D and you are going to improve the library B. Changing require statements leads to a real mess. # Perfect solution Is there a better/perfect way? How the tools of rubygems support this or could support this in the future? Thanks and Best Regards, Vladimir Dobriakov AKA geekQ _______________________________________________ Rubygems-developers mailing list http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems Rubygems-developers@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers
