Depend on guard

[deivid-rodriguez]

Guard is a dependency of its plugins.

[e2]

I'm sorry to say I have to reject this because of the way Minitest works - it breaks things in really, really obscure ways. In fact, the reason the dependency on Guard was removed in many places was because of Minitest.

It's maybe not intuitive, but plugins don't need to rely on Guard - they need to rely on Guard's API, not on Guard itself (since plugins don't use guard - they just inherit from Guard::Plugin).

This is why Guard::Compat was created (https://github.com/guard/guard-compat) - it's the "Guard API" that Guard plugins "depend on". This separation allows Guard plugins to be used while developing/testing other Guard plugins.

Also, theoretically, you could use Guard plugins without Guard in some cases other than specs/tests (e.g. Rake tasks - or simply reusing the code in the plugins).

The biggest problem is that Guard plugins use inheritance - it wasn't a good design decision, but there's no sane way out of this anymore (too many plugins - Guard::Compat is the best I could do to allow moving away from inheritance in the future - without breaking existing plugins).

So, in your Gemfiles you should have:

gem 'guard-minitest'
gem 'guard'

If this is causing problems (some undefined crashes or something) - do let me know, and I'll figure something out.

Thanks!

[deivid-rodriguez]

No, the only reason for the PR was to prevent specifying both guard and guard-minitest in my Gemfile (seemed redundant and it didn't make sense to me to use the plugin without guard). I checked a few guard plugins and they all seemed to specify the dependency, but it seems there's a good reason not to do it in this case.

Thanks!

[e2]

Thanks for letting me know.

Yes - the plugins will work, but the tests for those plugins could fail miserably (AFAIR - what broke the most were plugins themselves using guard-minitest for testing - I didn't want make to life harder for plugin authors).

I made the same mistake of adding back the dependency a few times until I realized what was going on.

I think it's ok for most Guard plugins to actually depend on Guard - Guard::Minitest is the exception though.

The tradeoff to making Guard a dependency of Guard::Minitest would be - no other Guard plugin could use Guard::Minitest for testing (not hard, though I think a few plugin authors would prefer to stick to Minitest anyway).

I actually migrated the Guard::Minitest Minitest tests to RSpec, because of the conflicts (shhh - don't tell any Minitest fanatics! ;) ).

[e2]

If anyone is interested in fixing this, it depends on this getting done first: guard/guard#713