An Interview with Andre Arko and Terence Lee from the Bundler Team

Can any of you remember what life was like before Bundler came along? Getting a Rails application to work was often a long, tedious trial and error process: you would start up the app and hope that you already had all of the required gems installed. Then when the application didn’t work, you would have to figure out which gems were missing and install them one after the other, hoping you didn’t break other apps.

All of this became much, much easier with the advent of Bundler. Now each Ruby application could specify a list of gems it required, along with the precise version of each gem. Bundler would then allow the Ruby application to access only the specified gems, and no other gems that might be present on your machine.

This week I was lucky enough to have the chance to talk with two members of the Bundler core team: Andre Arko and Terence Lee. We talked about how Bundler works, how they got involved with Bundler, when Bundler 1.1 will be coming out, how the Bundler test suite works, and a few other things. You can read the interview over on RubySource.com.