Package Management with Rubygems
Extracted from: Programming Ruby The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide Second Edition This PDF file contains pages extracted from Programming Ruby, published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf. For more information, visit http://www.pragmaticbookshelf.com. Note: This extract contains some colored text. is available only in online versions of the books. The printed versions are black and white. Pagination might vary between the online and printer versions; the content is otherwise identical. Copyright © 2004 The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher. Chad Fowler is a leading figure in the Ruby community. He’s on the board of Ruby Central, Inc. He’s one of the organizers of RubyConf. And he’s one of the writers of RubyGems. All this makes him uniquely qualified to write this chapter. Chapter 17 Package Management with RubyGems RubyGems is a standardized packaging and installation framework for libraries and applications, making it easy to locate, install, upgrade, and uninstall Ruby packages. It provides users and developers with four main facilities. 1. A standardized package format, 2. A central repository for hosting packages in this format, 3. Installation and management of multiple, simultaneously installed versions of the same library, 4. End-user tools for querying, installing, uninstalling, and otherwise manipulating these packages. Before RubyGems came along, installing a new library involved searching the Web, downloading a package, and attempting to install it—only to find that its dependencies haven’t been met.
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