Default gems...what the what?

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

So I finally updated JRuby master to RG2 and want to offload a bunch
of libraries as gems. Last time I looked at this was a couple months
ago, so I had to review how MRI is doing it.

And what the heck...rbinstall.rb is not a lot of fun. As far as I can
read it, rbinstall.rb reads the list of default gems out of
defs/default_gems and reprocesses the associated specifications for RG
to pick up. There seems to be a big functionality gap here. I
attempted to just put specifications in the right location, but for a
normal install they don't include version number (required for default
gem stuff) and the filenames include version (appears to break default
gems because it can't find a simple name.

So...I think there's logic needed here to make it easy for an
implementation fo specify a default gem. I'm willing to hack on it a
bit, but wanted to get some input.

* Is the configuration setup for default gems set in stone? It would
be simpler if we could just use the installed specifications (version
in filename but not in spec) since there is no other way to get that
specification except for reprocessing.

* Assuming the current format needs to stay, should this be a new
command? gem install --default <x> or gem default <x> to install the
given gem, reprocess specification, and put it in the right place?

* Is there something I'm missing, or is the rbinstall.rb mechanism the
only way to properly set up the default gemspecs right now?

Thanks y'all. We're hoping to get this out in JRuby 1.7.5, perhaps in
the next month or two. Short list of gems that we'll be using RG2
defaults for: rake, rdoc, psych, krypt, openssl, minitest, json. There
may be others.

- Charlie
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[Charles Oliver Nutter]

Updates!

* I have created a pull request that adds a --default flag to install.
Installing as a default gem does mostly what rbinstall.rb does today,
by dumping a specification+file list to
GEM_HOME/specifications/default and unpacking only the bin scripts
from the gem. It could additionally unpack ext and lib contents into
the local stdlib, but that would be bonus work.

* JRuby has a default_gems branch where I'm working on this stuff. I
have a stripped-down rbinstall.rb that does the above logic until we
have RG support for it.

* I filed a bug with ruby-core and started refactoring rbinstall.rb.

- Charlie