From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-05-27T08:17:17+09:00
Subject: Re: RAA, gems, and RubyForge (was Re: User Account Setup - Multiple OS's)

On 5/26/06, Garance A Drosehn <drosihn@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/23/06, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5/23/06, John Gabriele <jmg3000@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 3. With the current RubyGems 0.8.11, should we do
> > >
> > > require 'rubygems'
> > > require_gem 'foo'
> > >
> > > or
> > >
> > > require 'rubygems'
> > > require 'foo'
> >
> > Never use require_gem unless you need to fix a gem version.
> > Avoid using it anyway, if you can.
>
> Hmm.  I seem to remember needing to use require_gem
> in some situation.  I started with require rubygems + require
> the_gem_I_needed, because I was copying those lines
> from some other example.  But that didn't work until I
> changed the second "require" to "require_gem"...
>

I've had to use it when I didn't have time to figure out what the
actual rb file name was for a gem.
An example of this is:
require_gem "rubyzip" # Works.
require "rubyzip" # Blows up
require "zip/zip" # Works, once you know it exists.