Shiny new bundler and my is_bot gem
If you haven’t already installed the release candidate of superfast bundler, then I feel sorry for you. It’s hard to put your faith in me but here’s an article that might change your heart. It’s super simple, just do:
gem install bundler --pre
Last year, I released a gem called is_bot (which is just a trivial way to fool the spammers). I have been using it in several projects and keep updating it with new releases of the Rails. Few months back when rubygems was having trouble with Syck yaml parser, I released a version - 0.3.3 - of my is_bot gem. As a result, this version of is_bot suffered from the same issue and it gave me error messages on subsequent installs. Since then, I have released three more versions of the gem and the current version stands at 0.3.6.
Now, the earlier version of bundler was quite forgiving and I could hack the cached gemspec file to install it. But the new version of bundler, simply rejects it. I was quite surprised to see the error message I get from bundler when I tried installing the current version - 0.3.6. Because, it doesn’t say anything about the 0.3.6 version but complains about 0.3.3 version. I thought I was going crazy. I even specified the version of the gem to 0.3.6 in my Gemfile but still it complained about 0.3.3 version. I know, I know that bundler needs to download the Big Index for dependency resolution but I never had this problem with the earlier versions of bundler, then why now.
Why my gem?
So, I did more investigation and ran the following command to see what exactly does bundler get back when it hits the rubygems’s endpoint:
ruby -ropen-uri -rpp -e 'pp Marshal.load(open("https://rubygems.org/api/v1/dependencies?gems=is\_bot"))'
and this returns something like this:
[{:platform=>"ruby", :name=>"is\_bot", :dependencies=>[["rspec", ">= 0"], ["rails", "= 3.1.1"]], :number=>"0.3.6"}, {:platform=>"ruby", :name=>"is\_bot", :dependencies=>[["rspec", ">= 0"], ["rails", "= 3.1.1"]], :number=>"0.3.5"}, {:platform=>"ruby", :name=>"is\_bot", :dependencies=> [["rspec", ">= 0"], ["rails", "#<yaml::syck::defaultkey:0xbd36f20> 3.1.0.rc6"]], :number=>"0.3.3"}, {:platform=>"ruby", :name=>"is_bot", :dependencies=>[["rspec", "= 2.6.0"], ["rails", "= 3.1.0.rc5"]], :number=>"0.3.2"}, {:platform=>"ruby", :name=>"is_bot", :dependencies=>[["rspec", "= 2.6.0"], ["rails", "= 3.1.0.rc4"]], :number=>"0.3.1"}, {:platform=>"ruby", :name=>"is_bot", :dependencies=> [["sqlite3", "= 1.3.3"], ["rspec", "= 2.6.0"], ["rails", "= 3.1.0.rc4"]], :number=>"0.3.0"}, {:platform=>"ruby", :name=>"is_bot", :dependencies=> [["sqlite3", "= 1.3.3"], ["rspec", "= 2.4.0"], ["rails", "= 3.0.3"]], :number=>"0.2.0"}, {:platform=>"ruby", :name=>"is_bot", :dependencies=>[], :number=>"0.1.0"}]
And you can see YAML::Syck::DefaultKey:0xbd36f20 bit that results in illformed gemspec error. I guess the earlier versions of Bundler had a fix for this issue, but the latest rc version loads up this information and straight-away complains about the illformed gemspec. That’s all good but what’s the solution for this issue.
Simple!
Yank the 0.3.3 version of the gem and you are good to go. Another solution would be to regenerate the gemspec for 0.3.3 again, which I hope rubygems stores uncorrupted. Phew.