[Rubygems-developers] Updating RubyGems as a GEM

[Jim Weirich]

There have been several requests to have rubygems itself available as a 
gem.  Unfortunately, that is a chicken and egg type of problem in that 
RubyGems must be installed before any gems can be downloaded and installed.

But, we could provide RubyGems *updates* as a gem.

Here's what I did ...  I created a Gem spec for "rubygems-update" that 
packages the current rubygems software as a gem.  Someone running a 
relatively recent version of RubyGems can download and install the gem 
with ...

    gem install rubygems-update --remote

Then they run a special command that updates their local installation of 
rubygems ...

    update_rubygems

The command works only once, and thereafter recommends that they can now 
uninstall the update gem.

In a way, I regret that we can't generate old-style gem files now, 
because if we could, we could use this technique to update current 
installations to the new format.

The changes are in CVS.  Take a look and provide feedback.

Other thoughts:  What do people think about adding a 
"post_install_command" option that could automatically run a script 
after installation.  That would allow us to get rid of the 
"update_rubygems" script.

On another note:  There are two unit tests failing since the gem file 
format has been updated.  One problem is that ill formated files 
generate an unexpected exception.  I haven't looked at the other problem 
yet.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich    jim at weirichhouse.org     http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)