`date` dependency requires native compilation about net-imap

[mperham]

I think explicitly locking versions with a comment is superior to using Bundler in a non-default mode. The KISS principle. 99% of Ruby developers, including myself, have no idea what the side effects of that switch are.

[mperham]

The issue here is that mail 2.8 now requires net-imap and almost every Ruby app that sends email via SMTP is now pulling in net-imap even though most of them do not use or need IMAP. Anyone wanting a pure Ruby environment will need to lock to mail 2.7.1.

I really wish Rubygems had optional dependencies so I could disable this type of unnecessary dependency.

[nevans]

@mperham instead of locking to mail 2.7.1, you could lock the date gem to

Gem::Specification.find{_1.name == "date" && _1.default_gem?}.version

You could even add that to the Gemfile (although you would still need a different lockfile for each version of ruby). Or you could add bundle add date --version $(ruby -e 'Gem::Specification.find...') to your deploy scripts?

Or you could lock net-imap to 0.3.1. If you don't even care about net-imap, then that might be the quickest, simplest answer!

Obviously, manually managing gem versions like this is a pain.

[nevans]

@mperham, I was about to start a discussion over at https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems, but then I wondered if the feature I wanted wasn't already supported. So I read through the bundler docs and found an existing option which might work for you, bundle install --prefer-local:

       --prefer-local
              Force  using  locally installed gems, or gems already present in
              Rubygems´ cache or in  vendor/cache,  when  resolving,  even  if
              newer  versions  are available remotely. Only attempt to connect
              to rubygems.org for gems that are not present locally.

It's not exactly what I was looking for, but it might be a better solution than the others I suggested?

In addition to your "optional dependencies" suggestion, I have a few other ideas for potential bundler features that maybe would help. i.e. bundle cache --include-platform-extensions or bundle install --prefer-system or bundle add --source system. But I'll save any deeper discussion of bundler feature requests for the rubygems repository. 😉

[nevans]

I think explicitly locking versions with a comment is superior to using Bundler in a non-default mode. The KISS principle. 99% of Ruby developers, including myself, have no idea what the side effects of that switch are.

I know what I want and expect the effects to be, but I've never actually used it so that also puts me in the 99% who have no idea! 😉

[hsbt]

I wonder if ruby/date would consider a PR for publishing pre-compiled native gems?

I can release it. But pre-compiled gems need many of maintenance resources. I'm negative to do it.

Or we could drop the explicit dependency. ☹️

It's the short-term solution. Because date gem(= library on ruby/ruby repository) has no maintainer now. So, I will extract date from ruby/ruby repository. After that, net-imap will break the missing dependency of date library.

We don't have to extract embedded Time library to default or bundled gem. Can we rewrite lib/net/imap/data_encoding.rb with Time class?