Updating gem to 1.2.0 on Ubuntu

Like several others, I tried to gem update today and failed. It gave me weird error telling me it couldn't find the update gem in the repository:

%> sudo gem update --system
Updating RubyGems
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org/
Updating rubygems-update
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
    could not find rubygems-update locally or in a repository

Googling gave me a fair few other links to people with the same issue. The main one seems to be listed under this ruby-forum topic which started as the release-notes for the Gem update to version 1.2.0. People that had problems updating to this gem listed their steps-to-reproduce in the replies below, and I tried all the suggestions.

sudo gem update --system was the original command I tried and it gave me the error as above. All the fora on the topic insisted that the workaround is to run: gem install rubygems-update -v 1.1.1, but this just gave the same error. I did note that most of these people were on various flavours of Mac, and the pleas for help from those on Ubuntu were drifting away into the sky unheard...

One forum user said he tried the above from his gem directory and that worked for him...
but not for me...

I even tried reinstalling ruby/rubygems via apt-get, but the former was latest version, and the latter doesn't exist...

I was about ready to nuke the site from orbit... and reinstall from scratch and went to the rubyforge page for rubygems. This lists the source code, but I also noticed it had individual "upgrade" gems available for download. This saved me from my previous scorched-earth plan, and eventually resulted in success. For future reference:

1. copy rubygems-update-1.1.0.gem to a local directory
2. then run: sudo gem install rubygems-update-1.1.0.gem
3. repeat with rubygems-update-1.2.0.gem
4. then run update_rubygems

Now it's all fine and sudo gem update --system happily fetches my new gems as before.

2.0 update or not 2.0 update: Is Rails 2.0 ready yet?

I had a play with converting one of my smaller playthings... er projects over to Rails 2.0 the other day. So far I see no convincing reason to convert yet. There were some small improvements, but I came across a couple of glaring bugs that make rake test incredibly painful to use.

When I find the specific ticket-numbers again I'll include them here, but to briefly describe the issue: The bug caused the setup method not to be called (ever) in unit tests. This meant that tests didn't get their fixtures fresh after every test. The several attempts to fix this issue somehow interfered with another bug that caused the controller not to be loaded in the functional tests.

Both of these situations are so impossible to work with that I'd recommend steering clear of Rails 2.0 for a short while.

I can see it being worthwhile using Rails 2.0 for new/greenfields projects - and putting up with the bugs until the Rails Core Team figure out how to fix them. But I would seriously recommend against it for any pre-existing project - especially one that is currently in a commercial/production environment. The pain of having to convert a complete test-suite over to work around the bugs (or to convert it all over to RSpec) isn't worth the effort just yet.

Conclusion: Yes, but not yet.