[RFC] How should we call out external dependencies? #105
Description
People are often confused when a particular plugin fails to install or run but it is unclear what is the missing dependency. These can range from a c compiler to client libs. I'd like to see that kind of information make their ways into the gemspec even if we can't auto install them we should call them out.
I think there are a couple approaches:
- as the plugins have been having testing slowly rolled out to them I have been including a
bootstrap.shthat installs various packages that are needed to run it - use gem metadata
I think requirements seems like a logical place to call these out in a uniform way. As this offers a better programmatic interface I think this makes the most sense but I am open to hear what others think.
I can think of several advantages of using the metadata for users and maintainers. For example if I wanted to query all the packages that require a compiler I could do that much easier through the rubygems api then parsing through some ad-hoc bootstrap scripts that may include other things like development/testing dependencies that are not needed for production.