Different flavors of a gem for different versions of Ruby

I'm updating my SqlStatement gem http://sqlstatement.rubyforge.org/ to be
compatible with Ruby 1.9, and owing to totally different ways of doing s-
expressions in Ruby 1.8 (which required RubyNode) and 1.9 (which can trap
the not and != operators as methods, so I can use the interpreter itself
to generate everything I need in an s-expression), the Ruby 1.9 version
no longer requires a dependency on RubyNode. In fact, RubyNode doesn't
exist for 1.9 AFAICT.

Is there a way to do one of the following in RubyGems?
* create a Ruby 1.8 flavor of the gem and another Ruby 1.9 flavor.
   Preferably, I'd like the gems to have the same name and live side-by
   side on RubyForge.
or
* Have both versions of the dependencies exist in a single gem,
   but only enforce the RubyNode dependency when the gem is installed on
   Ruby 1.8.

···

--
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/

Take a look at how the mongrel gem is doing it. It uses a bunch of conditionals to distinguish actions to perform for jruby and mri. adding in Ruby 1.9 support is (fairly) easy.

I forked mongrel the other day so I could take out the fasterthread dependency (not needed for 1.8.6+); might be useful: GitHub - dvdplm/mongrel: Mongrel on git

(and I'm sure it can be done more elegantly!)

···

On Sun, 2 Nov 2008 14:38:53 +0900, Ken Bloom wrote:

I'm updating my SqlStatement gem http://sqlstatement.rubyforge.org/ to be
compatible with Ruby 1.9, and owing to totally different ways of doing s-
expressions in Ruby 1.8 (which required RubyNode) and 1.9 (which can trap
the not and != operators as methods, so I can use the interpreter itself
to generate everything I need in an s-expression), the Ruby 1.9 version
no longer requires a dependency on RubyNode. In fact, RubyNode doesn't
exist for 1.9 AFAICT.

Is there a way to do one of the following in RubyGems?
* create a Ruby 1.8 flavor of the gem and another Ruby 1.9 flavor.
   Preferably, I'd like the gems to have the same name and live side-by
   side on RubyForge.
or
* Have both versions of the dependencies exist in a single gem,
   but only enforce the RubyNode dependency when the gem is installed on
   Ruby 1.8.

AFAICT from the metadata of the generated gems, this doesn't do what I
want. It generates different gems on different versions of ruby, but
there's no indication that these gems are different in the end. By the
way, I think you have a bug: if you generate the gem on Ruby 1.8.6, it
will be installable on Ruby 1.8.4 but won't include the fastthread
dependency.

--Ken

···

On Sun, 02 Nov 2008 07:37:17 -0500, David Palm wrote:

Take a look at how the mongrel gem is doing it. It uses a bunch of
conditionals to distinguish actions to perform for jruby and mri. adding
in Ruby 1.9 support is (fairly) easy.

I forked mongrel the other day so I could take out the fasterthread
dependency (not needed for 1.8.6+); might be useful:
GitHub - dvdplm/mongrel: Mongrel on git

(and I'm sure it can be done more elegantly!)

On Sun, 2 Nov 2008 14:38:53 +0900, Ken Bloom wrote:

I'm updating my SqlStatement gem http://sqlstatement.rubyforge.org/ to
be compatible with Ruby 1.9, and owing to totally different ways of
doing s- expressions in Ruby 1.8 (which required RubyNode) and 1.9
(which can trap the not and != operators as methods, so I can use the
interpreter itself to generate everything I need in an s-expression),
the Ruby 1.9 version no longer requires a dependency on RubyNode. In
fact, RubyNode doesn't exist for 1.9 AFAICT.

Is there a way to do one of the following in RubyGems?
* create a Ruby 1.8 flavor of the gem and another Ruby 1.9 flavor.
   Preferably, I'd like the gems to have the same name and live side-by
   side on RubyForge.
or
* Have both versions of the dependencies exist in a single gem,
   but only enforce the RubyNode dependency when the gem is installed
   on Ruby 1.8.

--
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/