Jyri had mentioned you can "chain" gem repositories using GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH. So I looked this up, and found a very useful page at:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToUseMultipleGemRepositories This page says that to set this up you need to do the following: - Create a new directory - Download the gem installation package - Initialize your local gem home using setup.rb from the gem installation package - Set GEM_PATH to include both repositories (the system one and your local one) - Set GEM_HOME to include your local repository This is doable, but is a lot of steps. I'd like to note what this page describes as the motivation for doing this: * Perhaps you are installing a Rails application on a managed host account and it needs a gem which the system administrator does not support. * Perhaps you're a system administrator and you want to allow individual users to add their own gems, without polluting the global collection you provide centrally. * Perhaps you just want individual Rails applications to have their individual requirements kept separate from each other to avoid Ruby's own equivalent of DLL Hell?! Note that all of these situations deal with machines where there are multiple users and you either want to control access to the system repository or manage potential collisions. But in the standard developer's laptop, there is only *one* person. In this case, which I believe is quite common, why are we maintaining two separate repositories for a single developer? What possible value, in terms of increased security or better management, can be gained by this? I can't seem to make sense of this. Your opinions are much appreciated. Sometimes I feel that by default we in Solaris-land are enforcing way too much security on a developer who owns the machine and should have full access to it. If this really is the way we want to go, then we need to find a way to automate this. Having to follow this kind of cookbook just to get started seems like a definite way to prevent people from getting going with Ruby in Solaris. I know Martin's doing some work in NetBeans, but not every developer is going to use NetBeans, so it would be good if we made this easier for developers outside of NetBeans too. Thanks! David -- David W. Van Couvering http://davidvancouvering.blogspot.com
