Rip: A New Way to Package Ruby Software

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"If you work on multiple Ruby projects concurrently, you’re probably accustomed to juggling gems. One project requires one batch of gems; another effort depends on a different set; and a third project utilitizes a specific legacy gem. Thankfully, the Ruby gem system can maintain multiple versions of the same gem in a single repository, making much of this task easy. If you need an explicit version of a gem (or any late model version, such as 3.x), simply install the code you need and name the dependency.

"But what if you want to test your code with different versions of the same gem? Worse, what if each variant of the gem depends on multiple versions of other gems? Soon you are wrestling with a morass of interdependencies and no effective technique to enforce and ensure revision locking among any prescribed subset.

"One solution is a virtual machine per configuration. Create a base image and create an instance for each permutation. That’s workable, albeit very time-consuming to establish and practice."

Complete Story

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