[ANN] RubyGems 0.5.0

[Chad Fowler]

Hello all,

RubyGems 0.5.0 has been released. This release adds a few new features
and some small bug fixes.

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126

The most notable new feature is the ability to further constrain
versions of dependent gems. To avoid API incompatibilities, you can use
"*" (as in ">*") to specify that the normal rules should apply with the
exception that a change in major version number fails the check. This
has been the subject of much debate, and we are hoping to get receive
some constructive feedback from the community on this one.

The changes for this release are:

* Jim added the ability to specify version constraints to avoid API
incompatibilities. This has been the subject of much debate for the
past couple of months, with many ideas and code contributed by Eivind
Eklund and Mauricio Fernandez. The following set of assertions shows
how it works:
assert_inadequate("1.3", ">* 1.4")
assert_adequate( "1.4", ">* 1.4")
assert_adequate( "1.5", ">* 1.4")
assert_inadequate("2.0", ">* 1.4") # This one is key--the new operator
disallows major version number differences.

* Group gem search output when multiple versions exist for a given gem:
activerecord (0.7.8, 0.7.7, 0.7.6, 0.7.5)
Implements the ActiveRecord pattern for ORM.

* Add arbitrary RDoc-able files via gemspec (not just Ruby source
files) for people who have, for example, README.rdoc in their
distributions. Add to gemspec via: spec.extra_rdoc_files = ["list",
"of", "files"]. Ruby files are automatically included.

* Add rdoc options to gemspec (spec.rdoc_options = ["--something"])

* Some small bug fixes

 

[George Ogata]

Is it feasible to package RubyGems as a gem?

Cheers.

 

[Chad Fowler]

Is it feasible to package RubyGems as a gem?

Mostly feasible and something some of us has discussed, but we decided
not to spend the time on it.
If we achieve our goal (inclusion with the Ruby distribution), its
being packaged as a gem itself is not as useful as if we don't achieve
our goal.

Fun idea, though isn't it?

I forgot to mention that the 'sources' of remote gems are packaged as
a gem and included with RubyGems. We could upgrade the sources list
remotely without having to reinstall rubygems. We are also using
Ara's Session library for unit testing, which we have redistributed
and packaged as a gem and install during the rubygems installation.

Chad

 

[Sascha Ebach]

Hi Chad,

Mostly feasible and something some of us has discussed, but we decided
not to spend the time on it.
If we achieve our goal (inclusion with the Ruby distribution), its
being packaged as a gem itself is not as useful as if we don't achieve
our goal.

Fun idea, though isn't it?

I forgot to mention that the 'sources' of remote gems are packaged as
a gem and included with RubyGems. We could upgrade the sources list
remotely without having to reinstall rubygems. We are also using
Ara's Session library for unit testing, which we have redistributed
and packaged as a gem and install during the rubygems installation.

It would be cool if you could do gem --update-dist or similiar and the
newest version of rubygems would be installed.

Thanks for rubygems. This is great stuff.

Sascha