[Rubygems-developers] Environment variables

[Gavin Sinclair]

On Sunday, April 18, 2004, 10:57:15 PM, Chad wrote:


> On 15/4/2004, at 8:28 AM, Gavin Sinclair wrote:

>> To expedite my completion of the GemReference, can a knowledgeable
>> authority please list the names and purposes of the environment
>> variables that 'gem' uses?  I've always found at least one of them
>> confusing, so I want the full story, not my own assumptions.
>>
>>

> Sorry this took a couple of days.

> GEM_HOME = The path in which to install gems.
> make = specifies the "make" program to use for building source gems.
> RUBY_GEMS = File::Separator delimited list of directories to search for
> to find gems.  Like PATH.
> HOME = typical use of HOME for finding config file, etc.


Thanks.  Is that use of $make common?  Sounds good.

I'm concerned about RUBY_GEMS: GEM_PATH would be more intuitive
(RUBY_GEMS could mean anything, really).  And I'd expect that the
*first* element in this path would be the target dir for installs.
Not sure why I expect that.  Isn't that behaviour apparent somewhere
at the moment?

Gavin