ruby_select plan, rubygem: dependency operator

[C. Florian Ebeling]

In the last couple days Brett Eisenberg, Wataru Kimura and I have been
discussing
a few changes to the Ruby ports on private mail, and I wanted to put
this publicly onto
the list for dicussion. Nothing earthshaking, but sure worth discussion.

It started with Brett's suggestion to have ruby 1.9 as default ruby,
without suffix.
That is possible already by setting the nosuffix variant. It would
been more convenient
and more consistent across MacPorts to use the *_select approach, which python
and gcc have adopted. This is the solution we have agreed on now among us.

So the course of action will be:
1 rename ruby port to ruby18
2 create ruby_select port

I added the suggestion to maybe have another third step:
3 create port ruby again which is empty mostly, but pulls select_ruby
and symlinks
to default version (which ever that is then) This one is not agreed on yet
and still to be discussed.

Other ideas came up as well. It is not really very convincing to have rubygems
installed through mp, marked as installed, accidentially uninstalled
directly using
the gem command and break downstream apps that rely on these dependencies.
Kimura had the idea to introduce a new dependency type, rubygem: maybe,
which would largely work like path: or lib: dependencies. I like that
approach and will
write a ticket for this.

An open question is wether to include jruby and other implementations as well.
But that can come later as well.

What do you think of the plan? Any commentary, maybe educated by python
experiences?

Florian






-- 
Florian Ebeling
Twitter: febeling
florian.ebeling at gmail.com