Git repos in vendor/gems

The discussion on #553 in Lighthouse got me thinking - would it be useful to enable vendored gems to be git repos? WIth many gems moving to github, most have a working copy of the gemspec in the repo.

For instance, a trunk copy of, say, attribute_fu could be dropped into vendor/gems with

git clone git://github.com/giraffesoft/attribute_fu.git vendor/gems/attribute_fu

My first thought was that this might be very useful for gem developers...

It would be straightforward to implement, but does it sound useful?

Thanks,

--Matt Jones

I'm most likely biased, because I wrote braid but, this would also be great because one could use braid[1] (or one of the other tools) to manage the updating of the gem's code from upstream. And this would be handy because you could track gems that are in development and don't release proper gems that often.

There quite a few tools available to manage your vendored code: braid, giternal, externals, cached externals, piston, submodules.

A good writeup of all the available options is in the works here:

http://github.com/gary/dependency_management_talk

Cristi

I'm currently implementing some infrastructure for managing plugins, but if could easily support this, too. The relevant parts are in railties/lib/plugin_manager.

<http://github.com/dasch/rails/tree/plugin-manager&gt;