Hey Mark, I agree with Matt that macruby_deploy needs work in this area, and any effort you can contribute (or experience that you have gained from working on your gem plugin) would be greatly appreciated. That said, I think a gem plugin is a separate (and, IMHO at least, as valuable) issue. So then, my personal view on the options you outlined: - A gemspec property (e.g. spec.compile_for_macruby = true)
This seems more apt of an addition for MacRuby specifically. Unfortunately, it seems that extraneous gemspec properties are not ignored, but if they were, this would be a prime candidate for an option that is only used by macgem. Now that I'm thinking about it, though, I wonder why we wouldn't just have MacGem compile all gems?
- A gem command: gem compile nokogiri gem compile —remove-original-files nokogiri • I can’t remove the original *.rb files and leave *.rbo files by default because of how rubygems identifies gems (unless I modify gemspec files)
This seems most in keeping with how other gem extensions work. I don't think removing original files is all that important though, since keeping them around is also useful for debugging gems.
- A gem install option gem install —compile nokogiri
Maybe this is better handled with an option in .gemrc? or an environment variable? I'm afraid I'm a bit too swamped at the moment to lend a hand directly, but I like the direction you're going, and I'll definitely keep an eye on where this is going. Cheers, Josh