config.gem github friendly (discussion)

I like James Beddington's solution. It makes it more clear what's happening, and doesn't do anything special for github.

config.gem_source :github => 'http://gems.github.com'
config.gem 'user-foo', :source => :github

Common repos like github could be specified by default.

A few things:

• I don't think that Rails should have a bunch of github-specific code. The solutions presented help a little, but they use quite a few lines in the framework to save a few characters in environment.rb.

• the gem_source thing is coming close to replicating some of the functionality of Rubygems.

• Finally, it's looking more and more like the entire mechanism will need to be rewritten for 3.0; there are a number of edge cases where the existing code breaks badly and solutions are hard to impossible. There's also the problems experienced by some users where gems:install needs to load the environment, but the environment won't load without the gems.

I'd encourage anybody who reads this and has an interest to comment on #1721 Unify approach to gem dependencies with ideas.

@Matt

I think you're right. This solution doesn't make any sense if the whole config.gem 'thing' is giving errors to everyone. I've read your ticket and it's much more important than this.

I sent this ticket while I was trying the new Templates feature, but I didn't use the config.gem command before (I didn't need).

After trying it, I have to say it doesn't work at all, fails on almost every gem, in both local and remote machines, constantly complains about non-writable directories, tries to download the gems in ~/.gem, etc.

Well, If I come up with any interesting idea to solve this, I will comment it in your ticket.

Cheers

@Matt

I alrteady tried it with :sudo => true (and with sudo rake gems:install too).

Well, actually, "almost every gem" means that once one gem fails to install, all others fail as well, they don't install because the code "exists" due to a single exception (which is very irritating, it will be far better to try to install all, and then ouput a report with the problems found if any).

I've been playing a bit with the "position" of the config.gem command inside the environment configuration to figure out what is the gem or gems are causing the problem. I've just tried this:

  config.gem 'mislav-will_paginate', :lib => 'will_paginate',
    :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
  config.gem 'RedCloth', :lib => 'redcloth'
  config.gem 'rubyist-aasm', :lib => 'aasm',
    :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
  config.gem 'aslakhellesoy-cucumber', :lib => 'cucumber',
    :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
  config.gem 'rspec', :lib => 'spec'
  config.gem 'rspec-rails', :lib => 'spec/rails'

All gems were installed except Rspec (in my previous config rspec was the first config.gem, for that reason I said 'almost every gem', it makes all others to fail)

This is the ouput:

/Users/**sysaccount**/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rspec-1.1.12/lib/spec/runner/options.rb:240:in `files_to_load': File or directory not found: gems:install (RuntimeError)

By the way, I already have this gem installed.

Cheers

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