--- date: "2004-08-25T11:50:59Z" title: RubyGem Thoughts ---

Last night I created RubyGems for FAM-Ruby, Imlib2-Ruby, Joystick-Ruby, MB-Ruby, and Xmms-Ruby (with a Raggle gem coming soon). The gems I've made so far are available here. RubyGems seems promising, here are my thoughts so far:

Easy to use: once you get the hang of things it only takes a few minutes to create a gem for a package. There's a guide called "Create a Gem in 10 Minutes", but it looks like it's about 20 minutes too old; some of the command-line flags have changed since the guide was written.
Seems to be popular: A lot of popular projects seem to be creating gems (check out the list so far).
No build-in signing! Or at least it's not in the documentation I sifted through. There should be either a built-in way of attaching signatures (you're already loading the files and encoding them; MD5 or SHA-1 the contents, then sign that with GnuPG). I home they address this soon, because I think a package management system without some sort of end-to-end security is dead in the water.
Funky YAML storage format that's "not much larger than tar". That's nice, why don't you just use tar instead? RPA-Base does. To be fair, according to the RPA FAQ, RubyGems is adopting the RPA file format in the next release.
I want mirrors of the main gem distribution site. It's easy enough to create and maintain one, someone just needs to step up to the plate.
The --ri-site option should work for RDoc inside the gemspec files. Right now it doesn't seem to.
Gem Server is neat!
Should have some sort of dependency removal on uninstall feature, ala RPA-Base and aptitude.
Generating Ruby code inside the gem worries me, especially without any sort of developer signing going on.

I'll keep fiddling and let everyone know what I come up with.