From: Len Lawrence <lcl@...>
Date: 2009-09-22T09:05:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Vicious versioning cycle prevents upgrading Ruby Gems

On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:25:07 -0500, William Mcneill wrote:

> If I setup Gems from a tarball on a machine with Gems already installed
> in a non-standard location will it automatically upgrade instead of
> creating a new version, or do I have to specify the path as an argument
> to setup.rb?
> 
> If I do have to specify the path, is it the same as what gem environment
> lists as INSTALLATION_DIRECTORY?
> 
> I'm trying to avoid doing a clean install and having to re-install all
> my gems.

I am no expert on this.  The setup.rb file has a --help option which 
indicates that you can supply an installation PREFIX if you wish but this 
will not affect the location of your installed gems so you should not 
need to re-install them all.  That means leave INSTALLATION_DIRECTORY 
alone I would think.  No harm in downloading the package and looking at 
the documentation files provided.

The README file lists other commands like

  $ gem install --system

and

  $ gem install rubygems-update  # again, might need to be admin/root
  $ update_rubygems              # ... here too

which I had not tried.

Hope this helps

Len