On Jul 21, 2011, at 7:55 PM, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote: > I love rubygems, I think it's the best packaging system out there. I've been > spoiled by it throughout my 5 years of working with Ruby. > > I was wondering if it could be extended / modified to serve packages for > other languages. Let's say I develop a new language X, and start creating > new libs. Instead of creating a new packaging system, I'd like to adapt > RubyGems to work with it. Doesn't matter if ruby is needed.
Since RubyGems is written in Ruby using it for another programming language seems a little odd. Requiring Ruby to install packages for other languages seems odd. > I know that ultimately it would be possible, I just don't know how hard > would it be and if other people already though about that. Perhaps someone > is already doing something similar out there :) As far as I know, nobody has ported RubyGems or its packages to another language. It's certainly possible to port RubyGems to another language, but it would probably be better to steal the ideas of RubyGems instead. A .gem is a tar file containing a chunk of gzipped metadata and a gzipped tar file with the contents. The tar format is easy to implement in ruby and libz bindings can be found most anywhere. If I were writing RubyGems from scratch I wouldn't make the specification behave the same way. In particular, it's too easy for people building packages to touch things they're not supposed to like specification_version. Also, RubyGems' commands were built then API was extracted from the commands long after. I would aggressively refactor API out of the commands as they were being built. _______________________________________________ Rubygems-developers mailing list http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems Rubygems-developers@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers
