VI.9 Design Decisions

This section lists the important design decisions that were made while docToolchain has evolved. They fulfill two tasks:

• Explain to users and contributors who are new to the project why things are the way that they are
• Help to revise decisions for which the base has changed

DD1: Wrapped Plugins instead of Ruby Gems

Problem: Asciidoctor plugins can be referenced directly as Ruby gems or as Java dependencies to the JRuby-wrapped .jar files. While Ruby gems always provide the latest version, it might take a number of days for the JRuby versions to become available. Both types of plugins are downloaded from different repositories. In an enterprise environment, the Ruby Gems repository might not be accessible. Since the user of docToolchain is likely to be a JVM developer, and Gradle already depends on Java repositories, the Ruby Gems repository is an additional dependency and would violate C3: Enterprise-ready.

Decision: docToolchain will always use the JRuby version...