On Wednesday, August 18, 2004, 12:17:52 AM, Richard wrote:




> On 8/17/04 10:04 AM, "Austin Ziegler" <halostatue / gmail.com> wrote:

>>> On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 10:31:15PM +0900, Richard Kilmer wrote:
>>>>> Why not offer both? That is, give the spec author a simple token that
>>>>> can be detected to stub everything in the lib directory?
>>>> Well, because is rather defeats the purpose of keeping the files out of the
>>>> site_ruby dir.
>> 
>> Well ... what's to stop me from listing all of my lib/* files anyway?
>> 
>> -austin

> Nothing stops you, but nothing forces you either.  In most libraries, there
> is a main file to 'require' (which then requires the rest of the required
> files) and you document your library accordingly.  At least, with the
> libraries I write, that is how I design them.  I guess if your library was a
> random collection of a series of separate files that could individually be
> required or not, then stubbing every one would make some sense.

That _is_ the case in one of my libraries, but I reckon that's not
often the case.

It does happen reasonably often, though, that a library has several
potential 'require' targets, some of which will never be loaded unless
you ask for them.  Rake's not a good example, because it's more an app
that a library, but it's all that comes to mind at the moment:

  require 'rake'
  require 'rake/packagetask'
  require 'rake/rdoctask'
  # etc.
  
Gavin