Josiah and I had a system which was a small service and gem plugin
that mapped dependency+version (provided via the metadata facility)
to a platform-specific set of packages. Then based on the
user-selected or detected platform it would install those packages,
elevating privileges if necessary. It would then finish the gem
installation which at that point should work no differently than it
does now.
Hooks have been in rubygems that can make this work since 1.6 or so
(and I believe this was around the time we came up with this idea).
Someone just has to write it. That someone will likely not be Josiah
or myself, but I'll be happy to detail this for anyone that's
interested in building such a thing. It's not very complicated and
there's a little code out there, but not much; I think it was
written at the last philly.rb we both attended which was around 2
years ago, but it's a simple enough idea to get your head around
regardless.
Metadata is arguably the perfect place for this for the reasoning I
try to provide above. Third party tools can support it, devs can use
those third party tools, and production systems don't have to if
they don't want to. If you want a fancy DSL, I don't think anything
keeps you from subclassing Gem::Specification.
I agree. The missing piece is some kind of convention or
recommendation on the metadata, so that I do not have to fork every
native gem I plan to use and maintain them on my own but I can send a
Pull Request instead and have some possibilities that the owner
accepts that.
Which metadata key and values were you using or would you suggest?
It was geared towards developers. Making rubygems or mkmf satisfy
system dependencies as a first class feature would make writing
replacements for both a very appealing topic for sysadmins that have
to support ruby stacks and don't work around both already.
-Erik
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