This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: One million RubyGems, half from Rails Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

Chad Fowler has announced that RubyGems, the defacto packaging standard for Ruby, has served over one million packages. That's amazing. RubyGems has surely lived up to its promise of making the installation and maintenance of libraries, frameworks, and applications a painless experience. Whenever I'm drawn back into the dark world of a three-step setup.rb, I shudder. We all have to start somewhere, but I'm thrilled that we don't have to stay there.

Equally fantastic is the fact that almost half the gems served are from Rails. The main Rails package alone has been downloaded through RubyGems 110,243 times at the time of writing. Combined with the tgz downloads, that puts Rails at almost 130K downloads. Not too shabby for a 1-year old.

But in all this cherry go happy, I'm still not an entirely happy man. See, RubyGems is still not part of the core Ruby distribution. I still can't just type "gem install rails" on a fresh Ruby installation and expect it to work. That makes me sad, as Shugo would say.

Thankfully, it looks like its finally going to happen. If not for the imminent Ruby 1.8.3 release, then for the soon-following 1.8.4. Can't wait to cut that step out of the How To Get On Rails message.