Sorry for these numerous minor releases in a few days but some of the bugs we are trying to nail down are related to gem installation. It seems we have finally found what was causing all these troubles:

It’s the github gems that are making a mess. Hopefully all the authors have moved their gems to gemcutter so we can now release a gem without any dependency on any other source apart from the official “gems.rubyforge.org” (points to same ip as “gemcutter.org”).

I’d still be quite happy if the official and final hosting site for gems was clearly chosen between “gems.rubyforge.org” (legacy default), “gemcutter.org” (nice and new site) and “rubygems.org”, announced as official on gemcutter.org.

gem cleanup

If you are like me and have many legacy gems around, you might want to do some cleanup (at least regarding your gem sources). To do so, I had to:

# sudo gem sources --remove http://gems.github.com
# sudo gem sources --remove http://gemcutter.org
# sudo gem sources --update

But that was not enough, I also had some weird setting in .gemrc:

...
:sources:
  - http://gems.github.com
  - ...

I just removed the “sources” key and list. When I had to install the “mysql” gem, I had to add some compiler settings (on mac OS X Snow Leopard):

# sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Now my gems install much faster and I’m happy again.