Ruby packages: chaos and confusion

January 31, 2010

In October of last year, someone built a new RubyGems hosting site called Gemcutter. Everyone liked it so much that GitHub decided to stop offering RubyGem hosting, and point people at Gemcutter instead.

Then the maintainer of RubyGems decided to make Gemcutter the default repository for gems when you install RubyGems.

Then RubyForge decided to get rid of their Gem hosting, and make gems.rubyforge.org point to Gemcutter.

Now, it looks as if RubyForge is going to go away. The Gem-specific bits will migrate to Gemcutter, and the rest will be left to other sites that deal with bug tracking, source code versioning, and so on, like Sourceforge, Launchpad, GitHub, and Google Code.

So RubyForge is still there for existing projects, but its days are probably numbered. You now want Gemcutter for Gems, and some other site for everything else.

So on the minus side, there’s no longer a central repository for Ruby projects. On the plus side, you can now use something better than SVN for version control, and presumably all the dead and empty projects cluttering RubyForge will be allowed to vanish.

Filed under: Programming, Ruby | Comments (0)