doubts.markdown

User does COMMAND (rake, rackup, gist, rails, etc.). What does he mean?

There is no Gemfile in the directory

The user almost certainly means to run the binary against system. Success!

There is a Gemfile in the directory

Ambiguous. It depends on a few more details.

There is no Gemfile.lock or the Gemfile.lock is out of date

Ambiguous. The user may be using a system command to bootstrap (e.g. rake bundle).

If we choose bundle exec, the command will fail because the gems are not available on the system.

If we choose the system, they may be running a command like rackup, which should fail if the necessary gems are not available on the system.

The Gemfile.lock is up to date

Ambiguous.

Are all of the gems in the Gemfile.lock present on the system? If not, ambiguous. The user may be using a system command to bootstrap.

Is the gem associated with the executable present in the Gemfile.lock, and specified as a top-level gem? If so, the user almost certainly wants bundle exec. Success!

Is the gem associated with the executable present in the Gemfile.lock, but not specified as a top-level gem? If so, ambiguous. We cannot tell whether the user knows that the gem is a dependency of a gem they included. Example: rdoc is a dependency of a number of gems. If the user types rdoc, do they know that?

Is the gem unassociated with any gem in the Gemfile.lock. If so, the user almost certainly does not want bundle exec. Success!

We should have a fix for that issue in 1.2 :)

@wycats, sweet, thanks :)

So I take it that unlike what this post says, rubygems-bundler likely won't be part of bundler, because there are too many ambiguous cases?

That's kinda what I'm wondering too. I'm also wondering if incorporating Bundler-like abilities into RubyGems (which is planned / being considered for 2.0, IIUC) are not such a good idea after all.