Posts tagged gems

Oct03

Instant Gem Publishing with Gemcutter

ruby gems | comments

Ruby gem repositories are a bit of a headache right now. The current options:

  • Rubyforge - In addition to being a gem host, Rubyforge has lots of features you may (but probably don’t) care about. Sourceforge-style projects, revision control, mailing lists, and so on. gets in the way of the one thing you certainly DO care about: publishing gems. Putting gems on Rubyforge is a very manual process (though Jeweler and others offer automation workarounds). Gem propagation is slow, as long as 24 hours to propagate to all mirrors.
  • Github - Publish gems to gems.github.com by bumping your revision number and then git push. (Deploying with git push makes sense to me, naturally.) Typically they get built within ten minutes. Github is good for diversity since every fork can have their own gem, but this is its strength as well as its weakness. Having a canonical place to look up the primary version of a gem, in particular for automated dependency resolution, makes Rubyforge still the top pick for publishing major gems.
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