Distributing binaries as rubygems

[camertron]

This discussion pertains to the article on the Evil Martians blog entitled "Kubing Rails: stressless Kubernetes deployments with Kuby". It is part of a series of discussions pertaining to the article that will hopefully help improve Kuby and its ecosystem.

From the article:

kuby-core depends on the helm-rb and kubectl-rb gems, which contain their corresponding binaries in the distributions. This is a pattern I wish didn’t exist in the Ruby community, but, alas.

Why? As I see it, distributing the binaries as rubygems has the following major benefits:

1. Bundler chooses the right platform for you, meaning there's no need to guess the platform and download anything at runtime.
2. No need to install these tools, they're downloaded and installed along with everything else when you run bundle install.
3. kuby-core can depend on specific versions of the helm-rb and kubectl-rb gems instead of relying on the developer installing the right versions.
4. The gem can be versioned independently of the tool itself.

/cc @palkan