Bundler: The Easy, The Hard, and the NP-Complete - Chris Continanza

This talk was presented at Austin on Rails at OtherInbox on Oct 26, 2010.

Bundler manages an application's dependencies through its entire life across many machines systematically and repeatably. This library, written by carlhuda, has become a requirement of Rails 3 to manage gem dependencies and is has rapidly become standard for gem management in the Ruby world. In other words, if you're doing Ruby work you're going to be using the Bundler.

This talk's goal is to educate you not only how to use the Bundler, but on how and why it works. We're going to take a look at the easy stuff: using Bundler to manage your gems via a Gemfile. Then we're going to take a look at the hard stuff: what Bundler is doing to your beloved ruby environment to fight the system (gems). Lastly, we'll take a look at the NP complete stuff: the resolver algorithm, which is a real-world example of a constraint satisfaction problem being solved with depth-first search and backtracking.

Chris is a Ruby hacker who enjoys making things, especially software and music. As a student his research was in teaching Computer Science with Lego Robotics and in generating melody lines using Ruby's midi library and mathematical chaos. Chris has been using Ruby and Rails since he discovered them after struggling with J2EE and is currently employed as a rails developer.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• austinonrails
• rubyonrails
• ruby
• rails
• bundler

[werdnativ]

Array#permutation and Array#combination -- cool! I had no idea these were in ruby.

Backtracking: isn't using throw/catch for program flow control kind of hackish? I mean, it looks awesome, but I've also heard it's slow (ref: Avdi Grimm)... If the goal is to speed up the algorithm, maybe that "1/7th" time savings in node traversal is a wash?

[bytedildo]

great lecture. thanks!