This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Red Handed. Original Post: The Coast is Clear to Vocally Praise RubyGems Feed Title: RedHanded Feed URL: http://redhanded.hobix.com/index.xml Feed Description: sneaking Ruby through the system Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Red Handed Latest Posts From RedHanded

For awhile, the Ruby packaging playing field was utterly undecided. Can you imagine that just summer-before-last your only real option was to use raa-install, which was great, but sort of depended on the right install scripts and proper URLs in the RAA. It was a cool hack, thankyou Patrick May.

RubyGems is excellent and has been a huge boost to the proliferation of libraries. It’s features are impressive. Here is what I mean.

Getting library versions with introspection. I’m not sure why loaded_specs is hidden.

 require 'rubygems'
 require 'builder'

 class << Gem; attr_accessor :loaded_specs; end
 Gem.loaded_specs['builder'].version

 # Other metadata, of course...
 Gem.loaded_specs['builder'].description

Serving up all your system’s gems. And documentation for all of them, which we love already. But if you want to check your remote machines to see what’s installed…

On the server: gem_server.

On the client: gem list -r --source http://that.machine:8808.

Searching gems. I have a tendency to pipe the gem list through grep when I’m searching. Here are commands for gem’s own built-in search.

Short: gem q -r -n webdav.

Or completely: gem query --remote --name-matches webdav.