Restart RubyGems & Bundler Merge Proposal

[colby-swandale]

The maintainers of RubyGems and Bundler have long considered merging the projects. In 2021, we folded the Bundler project into the RubyGems repository, and with the new 4.0 major release, both projects now have synchronised release versions.

I want to begin developing the proposal to carve out the path to merge Bundler and RubyGems into a single project, and what the end result would ultimately look like.

We want to do this to unify Ruby's package management into a single, coherent tool and deliver the consistent experience developers expect. This would bring Ruby in line with how other languages handle dependencies.

[hsbt]

👍

I and @tenderlove discussed random idea about this in last year. We can introduce gem bundle over bundle install and merge bundle exec into the current behavior of gem exec.

[tenderlove]

👍 on this.

It's very difficult to do refactoring in RubyGems / Bundler because of the split code codepaths (we just ran in to a problem here). I think this is a huge pain point and creates a high entry barrier for new contributors.

We can introduce gem bundle over bundle install and merge bundle exec into the current behavior of gem exec.

+1

One thing I think we could do short-term is to just completely combine the code: move bundler/lib in to lib, then ship the bundler executable with rubygems-update. One thing we'll probably have to do is remove the "bundler auto updates itself" codepath since it doesn't really make sense in this context.