bin/rails provided twice now

[darix]

I know it is kind of my fault that rails 3.0 still had the rails package. but with rc4 the bin/rails was provided by the rails gem. now railties and rails install it.

is this intentional?

[guilleiguaran]

Yes, It is intentional

e3053ee

[darix]

the commit message does not explain why it is needed to work without the rails gem.

If you want to keep the rails gem just as a wrapper for compat that will just pull all the needed other gems. then you could drop the bin/rails file in the rails gem and just have a readme or so in it. similar as done sqlite3-ruby and sqlite3

[guilleiguaran]

cc @josevalim

[josevalim]

It is required in railties so people that don't want the whole Rails package (which comes with ActiveRecord, ActiveResource and so on) can still use the binfile.

And it is also needed in rails because if the binfile is only available on the railties gem, the rails binfile for versions 2.3 ends up having bigger priority if it is installed last.

[jeremy]

As of RubyGems 1.8.10, gem install rails prompts whether you want to overwrite the rails executable:

rails's executable "rails" conflicts with railties
Overwrite the executable? [yN]

And Bundler raises an exception:

Using railties (3.1.0) from git://github.com/rails/rails.git (at 3-1-stable) /Users/jeremy/.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-preview1/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/installer.rb:161:in `check_executable_overwrite': "rails" from railties conflicts with installed executable from rails (Gem::InstallError)

Being able to install railties standalone isn't worth this.

[jeremy]

Bundle issue fixed in rubygems/bundler@da27033

[arunagw]

Can this be closed?? If it's fixed already ??

[arunagw]

Closing this. I think we are good now. It should be solved.

[alexch]

Sadly, not quite solved yet. (Or maybe it regressed.)

Using rubygems 1.8.21 and rails 3.2.2 allows this sequence of events:

$ gem install rails
$ rails -v
Rails 3.2.2
$ gem install rails --version 2.3.14
$ rails -v
Rails 2.3.14
$ rails _3.2.2_ -v
/Users/chaffee/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p125/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems.rb:316:in `bin_path': can't find gem rails (["3.2.2"]) with executable rails (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
    from /Users/chaffee/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/bin/rails:19:in `<main>'

$ gem uninstall rails -v 2.3.14
Remove executables:
    rails

in addition to the gem? [Yn]  y
Removing rails
Successfully uninstalled rails-2.3.14
$ rails -v
/Users/chaffee/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/gems/activerecord-3.2.2/lib/rails: Is a directory - /Users/chaffee/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/gems/activerecord-3.2.2/lib/rails (Errno::EISDIR)
    from /usr/local/bin/rails:19:in `load'
    from /usr/local/bin/rails:19

In other words, once you install rails 2.3, you can never again run command-line rails 3.2, even if you completely blow away 2.3.

Workaround: after gem uninstall rails --version 2.3.14 run gem install railties which will then allow

$ rails _3.2.2_ -v
Rails 3.2.2
$ rails -v
Rails 3.2.2

I think the solution is for the (now empty) rails gem to include a bin/rails executable, in addition to an identical one inside railties. Or to patch rubygems to look in many more places for a bin with the right name and version and file type.