Should we drop the Ruby Standalone from this package?

[mefellows]

👋 hello Pact JS-ers.

We have an issue at the moment (#416).

The TL;DR is that we package the Ruby standalone into the pact-core package, which is a dependency for pact to work, and these ruby binaries only work on a subset of OSs now, whereas we support a broader set in Pact JS (notably, arm/aarch64).

This means that the package can only be run on the lowest common denominator OS/arch combinations, causing issues such as #416

I’m proposing one of two things:

1. Move the bits of the code out of pact-core into pact, leaving only the bits in pact-core that use the Ruby standalone, and also dropping it as a necessary dependency of Pact JS
2. Remove all traces of the Ruby binary related code in pact-core , and bump a major version.

Option 1

Pros

1. Faster build and release times for pact (the thing 99% of our users actually need)
2. Allows teams to install pact-core if they still want to get the bundled Ruby CLI

Cons

1. Makes the wrapped FFI interface less re-usable (could be solved by creating yet another package)

Option 2

Pros

1. Makes the FFI interface more re-usable
2. Reduces the need to maintain an API we don't want to encourage (the JS wrappers of the Ruby binaries)

Cons

1. Removes a nice means to bundle the Ruby CLI into a project (could be mitigated in other ways that benefit the wider ecosystem)

[TimothyJones-DD]

I like option 2, but I would also say that we should move the ruby parts into pact-cli, and continue to expose the binstubs

[mefellows]

Yep, I think that's a reasonable option also. I do think keeping the FFI separate will yield longer term benefits, albeit right now we don't have any immediate use cases.

[TimothyJones]

I think it depends how it’s structured. Ideally the only thing in the core is code to do with the FFI- which would mean that the Pact-JS DSL could be used with other pact cores or frameworks, or that replacing it in the future would be easy.

However, if a lot of core concepts end up leaking into the DSL (like plugin implementation detail) there might not be much benefit