Transition published 26 Oct 2009 by Nick Quaranto
It’s time to talk about the future of gem hosting. I started Gemcutter as an effort to improve RubyGem hosting for everyone. I wasn’t happy with the ways that RubyForge or GitHub was currently handling it, and I felt there could be a better way of fixing this problem. I set out to make gem indexing instantaneous, information about gems more accessible, and to provide an open API for gem publishing. The overall goal was to eventually take over gem hosting on RubyForge, and work with the established community instead of trying to fight against them.
On September 25, I revealed that Gemcutter would be moving to http://rubygems.org, and becoming RubyGems.org: your community gem host. Today, I’d like to announce that Ruby Central has agreed to support RubyGems.org in becoming the default gem host for the community. We’re still in the process of working out all of the details of this migration, and it will involve several moves:
- http://rubygems.org will replace http://gems.rubyforge.org as the default gem host in RubyGems.
- Gem publishing off RubyForge will continue to work for the time being.
- We’ll be merging user accounts from RubyForge, so you’ll be able to log into RubyGems.org with your RubyForge login credentials. Your gem ownerships will also be transferred over.
So, what does this mean for RubyForge? The Ruby-specific functionality and data will be moved into RubyGems.org, and the parts that other hosting sites (GitHub, Google Code, SourceForge) can do better will be pruned away. Migration paths for those projects will be provided, we’re not throwing any switches without warning. RubyGems.org will not be gaining any “bloat” from rewritten RubyForge features.
The goal right now is to have the majority of this transition done before RubyConf (November 19). More information about dates and migration information, especially regarding when RubyForge features will be put into read-only mode will be placed here on the wiki.
I’d like to thank everyone involved for their support. I’m proud to say that RubyGems.org will remain at the center of the Ruby community going forward, and I invite you to join in with your own contributions. This is our gem host now, let’s make it awesome.
