Rails: vendor/gems or vendor/plugins?

Question

I'm to tracking dependencies with git-submodules in my rails app. So far I've added submodules for things like, haml, shoulda, and authlogic to 'vendor/plugins'. I've seen indications that I should be using 'vendor/gems' instead though.

Question: which directory is the appropriate place to put dependencies being tracked as submodules? Is the choice arbitrary?

Thanks

Answer 1

The short version - if it's a plugin put it into vendor/plugins, if it's a gem it goes to vendor/gems. However, there's no need to track gem dependencies via submodules - Rails config is just good enough for that. So, the usual pattern is this: use config.gem for gem dependencies tracking and git-submodules for plugin dependencies - and plugins always go to vendor/plugins.

Answer 2

In short, I'd use config.gems for everything except for the exceptions I've noted below.

This is the workflow I'd use:

1. All plugins/libraries for which gems exist for the version I need, I do

   environment.rb

  config.gem "plugin_name", :version => ">=1.0.0"
  

then:

  rake gems:unpack:dependencies
  

1. All other plugins that I install from source (Github, etc.) I run:

  script/plugin install github_url
  

and the plugin is placed in vendor plugins.

1. As far as submodules go, I'd only use submodules for plugins/gems that I'm actively developing or for which I plan to use specific commits, rather than the HEAD, and if I plan to change the commit I'm using often.