The point of separating the gem is so that we don't have to bump Capistrano's version, every time there's a change to what is effectively a first-party plugin. Sorry if the way I responded at GitHub was unclear.
It's a common theme of my maintainership of Capistrano that people have always asked for a web-based version, in the mailing lists, at user groups and meet-ups, more so since Capistrano 3 as we grow in popularity amongst teams who wouldn't normally have a Ruby toolchain installed on their machine.
That said, we have to strike a balance, Harrow was bootstrapped predominantly with money from my software development agency with some seed funding to see us through a smooth launch and get us the UX help we desperately needed to make a product we could be proud of (pro tip: don't let a bunch of ops guys write a Javascript app.), so we have to figure out if this is commercially viable, or whether it was a wasted endeavour, that puts me in the slightly uncomfortable position of what amounts to advertising baked in to open source tools.
As I wrote on my blog [1], it's a fine line to tread, but so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
[1]: lee.hambley.name/2016/04/24/seven-years-under-a-palm-tree.html
I guess I'm wondering why it needs to be a dependency in Capistrano - is there something in it that Capistrano needs? Wouldn't the new gem rely on Capistrano and not the other way around?
Regardless, the one lodging the issue probably should have stepped away from the keyboard before lodging the issue. Good on you for maintaining Capistrano, it's never an easy job so I hope you get lots of clients who pay you on time and make reasonable requests!
Thanks for the vindication, if it wasn't an external gem, I'd probably have to re-release Capistrano, exactly. This is less invasive.
> Wouldn't the new gem rely on Capistrano and not the other way around?
Typically yes, but I have a vested interest in promoting Harrow so that I can afford to keep working on open source, it's slightly cheeky but apparently I earned some good will in all the time I've worked on Capistrano as we've had genuinely net-positive responses to the suggestion.
> Regardless, the one lodging the issue probably should have stepped away from the keyboard before lodging the issue.
I'm guilty of writing much worse, a little empathy goes a long way on the internet. I just apply Hanlon's razor anytime I see something that makes my blood boil, apart from making me feel a little bit less bad about myself, it's a quality of life improvement.
Thanks for the constructive discourse.