Chris Carter schrieb:
> So if I were to spend this weekend getting optional/developer-time
> dependencies into RubyGems, would people want optional dependencies to
> always be prompted, only prompted when a flag is given, or never
> prompted?
> 

I suggest looking at Debian's way of doing it. They have "recommends"
and "suggests" dependencies. (after all, apt is probably the mother of
dependency management systems, and gem is intellectually based on apt-get)

The "aptitude" utility thus has "--with-suggests" and
"--with-recommends", as well as  "--without-...".

http://people.debian.org/~dburrows/aptitude-doc/en/rn01re01.html

Of course, debian also has "build-dependencies" which aren't installed
with "apt-get install", but "apt-get build-dep". So a fusion of these
two concepts should do the trick.

FWIW, I'd much appreciate adding such a notion to gem.

Paulus