[chef] Your feedback please: RubyGems versions and Merb 1.1.0 Support Issue

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

Ohai everyone,
I'd like to get your feedback about a problem we're facing with
supporting merb 1.1.0. This issue will only affect users installing
from rubygems. Users installing from apt or yum/RPM will not be
affected.

The issue is that Merb 1.1.0 depends on bundler. Bundler depends on
rubygems 1.3.6. Many platforms do not have rubygems 1.3.6 available in
their package repos, and some explicitly disable the 'gem update
--system' command.

As far as I can tell, there is no way for us to specify a dependency
on merb 1.0.x but also allow users to opt in to merb 1.1.0 when
installing via rubygems.

If we modify our gem merb dependency to allow merb version 1.1.x, then
users will get merb 1.1.0 when installing. If they have a rubygems
version less than 1.3.6, this installation will fail when it attempts
to install bundler. I am not sure what the behavior is if merb 1.0.15
is already installed, but if it tries to upgrade, it's possible that
the shortest path to success would be to reinstall rubygems from
source.

So, I'd like to know if you all feel it's reasonable to "require"
users installing from gems to upgrade rubygems to version 1.3.6, or if
you know of an elegant (or ugly!) solution to this problem. Ideally,
we'd like to make merb 1.1 opt-in until the rubygems situation
improves, but merb 1.1 support is a blocker for ruby 1.9 support for
us, so we'd like to support it asap.

As a side note, I've pushed a development branch with merb 1.1 support
to my github:

http://github.com/danielsdeleo/chef/tree/CHEF-1072
git://github.com/danielsdeleo/chef.git

If you're comfortable running a development branch, please try it out.
Report any bugs you find as comments on this ticket:
http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-1072

Thanks,
Dan DeLeo