[Fxruby-users] So what does everyone think about RubyGems?

[<ly...@kn...>]

All,

Traditionally I've distributed FXRuby as a source tarball and Win32
installer executables. As many of you may be aware, a new packaging and
distibution system for Ruby applications and libraries was kicked off at
last year's Ruby Conference in Austin. This project has a lot of momentum
behind it (see http://rubygems.rubyforge.org) and it seems likely that
RubyGems will become a standard part of Ruby in the future.

I'm strongly considering switching over a completely Gems-based distribution
of FXRuby for the 1.2 series, but I'd like to throw this out to you guys for
comments. I am specifically thinking that there would be (1) a "source" Gem,
which you'd download and run to build the code from sources (much like the
current source tarball); and (2) one or more "binary" Gems (probably Windows
only), which wouldn't require compilation (thus replacing the Win32
installer executables).

What do you guys think? This is certainly not a done deal, but on the other
hand I'd prefer to not support "all of the above". The advantages of going
with a Gems-based approach (in my mind) are the versioning and
dependency-checking capabilities that Gems provide. No disadvantages
immediately come to mind, but that's why I'm asking you for your feedback. ;)

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

Lyle