On the other hand, I agree completely. It’s tough sometimes to balance the niceties and recreating the wheel. Generally, I would err on the side avoiding AS as a gem dependency if possible. Unless, of course, you’re building a gem with the intent of using it with Rails.

In general (but in particular as a non-rails ruby user), I am really reluctant to introduce any gems with ActiveSupport dependencies just because of the sheer volume of stuff which ActiveSupport adds. More modularity may help with that, but at the time of recent versions of ActiveSupport don’t seem to provide any way to avoid loading activesupport/json – which as noted clashes nastily with any native (JRuby or C extension) json library you have loaded. This is a very real problem for us and has stopped us using some pretty basic and important gems like ‘mail’.

If you’re writing a library for wide re-use, please don’t be selfish – keep your dependencies to a minimum, and don’t introduce any dependencies which clash with other libraries in common use.

Working with rightaws, and the appoxy fork of it, outside of rails has proven to be very problematic due to reliance on multiple activesupport methods added to String. I consistently find my self defining things in the local namespace to eliminiate the dependencies.

Along the same lines, I’ve also noticed multiple methods in activesupport that have been brought back into either ruby 1.9 or ruby1.8.7, where the activesupport dependency is only needed when using 1.8.6 or below.

e.g. If someone wanted the convenience of blank? you should just write it yourself instead of including full libraries into your gem.

As Yehuda stated, AS3′s modularity solves much of the reasons why people include all of active support, however, if it is for 1-2 methods, it’s probably better to just write it yourself instead of adding more dependencies.

@yehuda @julio I’ve definitely been following the work on AS 3 and I really appreciate the drive toward modularity. I think that will help a lot.

@paul I appreciate the sentiment and I certainly have no desire to see ruby advancement held back by too many legacy concerns but my point here is that if you’re writing a gem, don’t force anything on your users unless it’s absolutely necessary. In most cases, something like ActiveSupport is more about convenience than necessity.

I present to you bundler and rvm. Welcome to 2010.