[LRUG] Analogue Blog roundup: Nov '09

[Matt Wynne]

On 12 Nov 2009, at 10:33, Tom Stuart wrote:

> On 12 Nov 2009, at 10:25, Anthony Green wrote:
>> There was also a quick fire discussion at the end regarding RubyGems.
>
> 2. Am I the only one who is fundamentally repelled by the idea of  
> system-wide package installation in the first place? The RVM and/or  
> bundler approaches seem an order of magnitude more sane to me  
> (approximately "vendoring FTW"), although there's a limit to how  
> many different simultaneous ad-hoc systems I can comfortably use to  
> manage per-project dependencies.

This is definitely what feels like the big failing with rubygems to  
me. In the Microsoft world where I recently escaped from, there was a  
move away from this global bucket model (COM) quite some time ago -  
the anti-pattern known as 'DLL Hell' - towards a more per-project  
dependency model. Most mature .NET projects seem to eschew the GAC  
(more modern global dependency bucket similar to COM) in favour of a  
private ./lib folder to store all the DLL dependencies for the  
project. It's not perfect but it always felt like a step in the right  
direction. Libraries in .NET are a bit easier to manage as they're a  
single file, and I've often wondered what lives inside a .gem file -  
could we just dump those into our ./vendor directories and have some  
magic potion crack them open for us at run-time?

cheers,
Matt

http://mattwynne.net
+447974 430184