[Rubygems-developers] Building binary gems

[Patrick Hurley]

Is there an easy (read automated) way to take an installed gem (that
required binary compilation) from a development/build machine and
create a binary gem to install on a different machine?

I have production servers that will not include a C/C++ compiler or
other development tools -- I would like to use gems for my packaging
and deployment. I can of course do this by hand, but it seems like a
common enough task, that others may have already encountered (and
solved) this problem.

If not would this feature be a welcome patch to gem?
Thanks
pth