Should the website directory be left in the plugin/gem install?

[Francis Hwang]

So, since I made the doc site, there's this directory website/ in the
admin_assistant project, which will add lots of files to your Rails
app every time you update it, either as a plugin or a gem. Is this
useful to keep around, or should it be pruned post-install? Mostly I
have it in there to have everything in one place, but it might be
annoying in your own Rails app. Or maybe it's convenient to have it
there, if you know how to jekyll it up? Thoughts?

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/

[Luke Melia]

From a dev perspective, it's unquestionably ideal to have it part of
the same repo. It makes it really easy to update docs with each
changeset. I've been borrowing a trick from the TDD book and updating
the docs before I make my test pass, so that when my test goes green
and I'm happy with the code, I'm ready to commit. In addition, you
have the benefits of having access to the docs of the version of the
plugin you're using, even if trunk and the public docs site has moved
on.

From a deployment perspective, it would be ideal to limit the code I
need to ship. i.e., I don't need to deploy tests or documentation. I'm
not sure we have a good solution for that generally in the community,
do we?

--
Luke Melia
lu...@lukemelia.com
http://www.lukemelia.com/

[Francis Hwang]

I guess it depends on how you include the thing in your app in the
first place. It's easy to delete a bunch of stuff in install.rb, which
gets called when you run ./script/plugin install. Doesn't get called
if you're vendorizing it from a gem install, though, but I get the
feeling that not many people are doing vendorized gems.

I could just make the install.rb script more aggressive about what it
deletes. But I'm curious about the issue you reported in that other
thread, where you had to patch Rails to prevent an excessive Rakefile
inclusion. By default ./script/plugin install should've deleted the
test_rails_app directory. Are you guys doing something besides ./
script/plugin install?

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/

[Luke Melia]

On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:00 PM, Francis Hwang wrote:

> Are you guys doing something besides ./ script/plugin install?

Yes. We use git submodules for most of our plugins so we can have our
own fork and easily commit and contribute changes to the upstream
maintainers. So we rarely run script/plugin install.

Not that you have to cater to this idiosyncratic (but brilliant ;-) )
approach.