Not sure I agree with this diagnosis -- Ruby gemspecs (for components) and Gemfiles (for dependency lists) are both executable Ruby code, but packaging troubles

Not sure I agree with this diagnosis -- Ruby gemspecs (for components) and Gemfiles (for dependency lists) are both executable Ruby code, but packaging troubles at the Pythonesque level are rare. The trouble I've had with Python packaging had a lot less to do with the specs being executable code than with there being tools with overlapping use cases which interpret them in different ways, none of which seems to cover all use cases, and whose documentation of what they expect in package specs is sometimes in conflict. If the specs turned to JSON-with-comments tomorrow, those problems wouldn't go away.