.shardspec could be useful

[jeromegn]

First off: I'm glad this was incorporated into Crystal.

Would it be desirable to add something like Ruby's .gemspec? I find that really useful to differentiate gems from projects. Also, it's actually Ruby code which gets evaluated, therefore there's no need to supply the version twice (once in a module's version.cr and once in the shards.yml file.)

Example:

# bson.shardspec

require "./src/bson/version"

Shard::Specification do |spec|
  spec.version = BSON::Version
  # ... other useful stuff once/if there's a registry
end

[jhass]

Please see the existing extensive discussions at crystal-lang/crystal#220, crystal-lang/crystal#1357 and #25 around the format.

[jeromegn]

Ah. I had searched in this repo for something related to that and didn't find anything. I guess I should've looked in the crystal repo.

There's only one real brief mention of the Ruby gemspec in those discussions (well, I didn't read it all, but a quick search found only one result.)

Should I talk about this in crystal-lang/crystal#1357 ?

[jhass]

There are several mentions of doing a Crystal based DSL and why that's not really preferable.

[ysbaddaden]

Note that the version can be extracted from shard.yml at compile time:

# src/version.cr
VERSION = {{ `egrep "^version:" "#{ __DIR__ }/shard.yml"`[8 .. -1].stringify.strip }}

Not pretty, but doable.

[jhass]

We actually could think about compiler support for that once shards ships with it, have compile time access to the entire parsed shard.yml