Ruby's Bundler: As Simple as What You Did Before

http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/30/bundler-as-simple-as-what-you-did-before/

by wycats • 16 years ago

24 13 16 years ago

dasil003• 16 years ago

I'm sure you've heard more than your share of complaints about every possible flaw in Bundler, but are people really still complaining about it?

I had my issues with Bundler since trying out earliesh version of it last year, and jumping on the early Rails 3 betas during the January bugmash and intervening months. There were warts for sure, but the biggest one was the pace of development and the outdatedness of the blog posts.

By now, however, it feels like all this complaining has put Bundler through a kind of crucible that RubyGems never had. From my perspective Bundler 1.0.0 is a pure joy to work with. The problems it solves were very real, and from where I sit it solves them in a very thorough way. At the moment I'm contemplating how to bring my 50k line 3-year-old Rails app up to Rails 3, and converting to Bundler is the first step with immediate and significant benefits. I lump Bundler in with efforts like RVM and Rubinius, as ambitious projects that are pushing the state of Ruby forward and keeping it relevant in a world of Clojures, Scalas and node.jses

FooBarWidget6• 16 years ago

I agree that Bundler is useful. However there are purists out there who see the existence of Bundler as a flaw in Ruby or its community: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736726

regularfry5• 16 years ago

Bundler is a worthwhile patch on rubygems itself, but from where I'm sitting it's only needed because rubygems is flawed. It solves symptoms, not underlying problems.

tomstuart• 16 years ago

It would've saved me a lot of time if I'd realised sooner that, as far as I can tell, you can't use Bundler with the Rails 2.x gems if you need a Git repository as the gem source (e.g. because you've forked them) because the Rails 2.x repo contains multiple gems but has no gemspec explaining that. [Although maybe adding a backported gemspec to the fork would work?]

Once I finally gave up trying to use Bundler to manage my forked Rails 2.x and just left vendor/rails as a submodule, all the rest of the bundled gems worked beautifully.

Ruby's Bundler: As Simple as What You Did Before

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