Questions about building a new gem using Wycats template

Question

I'm writing a new gem I'm basing off of Yehuda's new gem template and I'm slightly confused. Having a Gemfile with dependencies, and also specifying a gemspec with dependencies seems redundant to me. Can someone explain why this is desirable and if it's truly necessary?

Note, this is the first gem I've ever written so I'm new to all of this.

Answer 1

The .gemspec dependencies tell rubygems what it needs to grab to resolve the dependencies when a user installs your gem. The Gemfile is to manage the dependencies while you develop the gem. Rubygems and Bundler aren't connected, at least not yet.

Answer 2

The gemspec is required to build the gem. The Gemfile is more of a convenience, so that people who are working on your gem can easily pull in all the dependencies via Bundler. In the case that you're developing multiple related gems at once, you may also want to put git sources in the Gemfile, so all of the HEAD versions can be tested against.