A closer look at ruby gems
Have you ever been stuck at "Bulk updating Gem source index for http://gems.rubyforge.org/" while installing a gem?!Due the to the latest drop in the Internet connectivity in the middle east and my own country, Egypt, installing gems started to be like hell.. I had to wait for hours before having my library installed so I decided to have a closer look. surprisingly.. it was due to a bug in rubygems 1.0.1. You can easily overcome this by updating to the latest gem 1.3.1 through gem update --system Gem downloads libraries metadata about all available gems in a gem server. by default we have gem source "http://gems.rubyforge.org/" and recently i added "http://gems.github.com".gem saves this data in a cache file before it performs the required operation, so it doesn't have to download it again the next time. Part of the code that reads the cache looks like this: MARSHAL_FIELDS = { -1 => 16, 1 => 16, 2 => 16 } #... # Load custom marshal format, re