Consider deprecating this gem in favor of font-awesome-rails

[rmm5t]

In an effort to avoid community confusion, I'd like to propose deprecating this gem in favor of bokmann/font-awesome-rails.

Reasons: The font-awesome-rails gem...

• also tracks Font-Awesome core very closely.
• has a test suite
• works with Rails 3.2 and Rails 4
• works when fonts are stored on a CDN (like CloudFront)
• similarly doesn't require sass or less, but
• still works with sass imports (though if you're using Rails 4, you'll need to track sass-rails master at the moment)

If you're open to this, I suggest:

1. Clearing out the repository, but
2. Leave just a README with a pointer and explaination that font-awesome-rails should be used instead.

(I'm happy to submit a pull-request with this deprecation to save you time.)

Thoughts?

[balexand]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll do that if I ever stop maintaining this project, which I may do if your gem stays on the right path. In the meantime I believe that choice in the open source community is good. Any developer with a basic understanding of how to deal with dependencies will not be confused by the existence of multiple gems that provide similar functionality.

One of my biggest complaints about gems that provide trivial functionality like this is that they tend to suffer from feature creep. This creates needless complexity and code debt for developers who just want the basic functionality. I think your support for SASS import statements is an example of this. Since your gem doesn't provide SASS mixins or variables, there's no reason not to just use Sprockets require statements even when using SASS.

This gem works with Rails 3.2/4 (#2) and a CDN just as well as yours.

Also, I found bokmann/font-awesome-rails#31 while looking over the code in your gem.

[balexand]

Also, I'd be happy to link to your gem from my README. Just submit a pull request.

[rmm5t]

I understand. In fairness, of the 3 competing gems that I reached out to about this, yours was the only one that was actually tracking the latest version of FontAwesome.

Any developer with a basic understanding of how to deal with dependencies will not be confused by the existence of multiple gems that provide similar functionality.

Competent developers, yes, but you'd be surprised at how much unnecessary headache is out there..

One of my biggest complaints about gems that provide trivial functionality like this is that they tend to suffer from feature creep. This creates needless complexity and code debt for developers who just want the basic functionality. I think your support for SASS import statements is an example of this. Since your gem doesn't provide SASS mixins or variables, there's no reason not to just use Sprockets require statements even when using SASS.

Heh. Your gem supports it too. You just don't know it. We've done nothing special to support it, aside from a test case to ensure that it continues to work with different version combinations of rails and sass-rails. If your application already depends on sass-rails, you're good to go.

This gem works with Rails 3.2/4 (#2) and a CDN just as well as yours.

Cool. Have you solved the Firefox CORS problem already? See bokmann/font-awesome-rails#27

[balexand]

bokmann/font-awesome-rails#27 is not a good solution to the CORS issue. I've commented on the issue.

[rmm5t]

bokmann/font-awesome-rails#27 is not a good solution to the CORS issue. I've commented on the issue.

Good to know. This is exactly why I'd like to consolidate our efforts into one gem. There's little point in us competing on essentially the exact same underlying codebase. I'd love to get you involved in the font-awesome-rails project more directly.

[balexand]

Thanks for so quickly fixing the issue that I submitted. I could go for this.

[rmm5t]

Converted to a pull-request. Whichever direction you want to go, I'll completely understand.

Also, I'd like to include @bokmann in this discussion to try to convince him to add you as a collaborator to the font-awesome-rails project. I think it'd be great if you could help document the CORS/Access-Control-Allow-Origin stuff.

[bokmann]

This is a no-brainer for me.. I'm adding you now.

[balexand]

@bokmann @rmm5t Thanks for including me on your gem!