[ANN] RubyGems 0.4.0

ruby-talk
1

Hello Everyone,

RubyGems 0.4.0 was released yesterday
(http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126). This release contains mostly
minor bug fixes.

RubyGems’ functionality is stablizing, and what we really need right
now is more gems. If you have a ruby project–large or small–try
making a gem of it
(http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?CreateAGemInTenMinutes).
Send us your gems, and we’ll include them in the RubyGems repository.
If you’re not working on your own Ruby project, make a gem out of a
Ruby library or application you use. The more RubyGems is used, the
more feedback we’ll get, and the better it will be.

Since this release is mostly bug fixes, I thought I’d post the TODO
list (not really “official”, but I think most of us agree) for feedback
from the community. RubyGems 1.0 will probably look something like its
current functionality plus:

  • syncing gem repositories
  • finish removing STDIN/STDOUT dependencies in the lib in support of
    GUI or web front-ends to RubyGems.
  • some kind of versioning change (mauricio, eivind, or jim’s idea(s))
    should go into 0.5 for feedback/testing. Recent threads suggest that
    Jim will be committing something soon.
  • optional dependencies: “semitar can use REXML, but it works better if
    you have the ruby raptor library installed”, or not so optional as in:
    “you need Ruby/RSS > = 1.0 OR rss > 0.91 for this library to work”
  • ri data generation
  • support for installing binary (pre-compiled), platform-dependent
    gems. This already works as long as you pick the right gem manually,
    but I’d like the remote installer to intelligently select the right one
    and for the installer to throw an error (or a warning) if you attempt o
    install (e.g.) a Windows gem on a linux system.
  • Allowing a gem to specify a required ruby version: require_gem
    ’ruby’, ‘= 1.8.1’
  • Integration with platform-native packaging systems (rpm, deb, msi,
    etc.)
  • Enhanced RDoc support (specifying which files to run rdoc over and
    including rdoc options in the gemspec)

We’d love to get feedback, bug reports, and patches for the current
release (http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126) as well as our
proposed TODO items.

Thanks!
Chad