Ruby Gemspec Dependency: Is possible have a git branch dependency?

EDIT

According to a commenter, this is no longer true. Prior information retained for historical context.

Duplicating the reference to a gem in Gemfile and .gemspec now appears to raise a warning message in Bundler, so this answer would appear to be no longer true.

Outdated info

This article by Yehuda Katz cleared up similar confusion for me. It says that, for use in development only, it's best to add the git stuff into the gemfile, but that bundler will still use the dependency/version info from the gemspec (seems magical to me, but I trust Yehuda).


This is not possible, and likely never will be because it would be rather heavy-handed for RubyGems to allow gem developers to require that users have a specific version control system installed to access a gem. Gems should be self-contained with a minimal number of dependencies so that people can use them in as wide an array of application as possible.

If you want to do this for your own internal projects, my suggestion would be to use Bundler which supports this quite well.