rubygems broken

Hello,

I have been trying for the last three days on two different debian linux platforms x386 and amd64 using different rubygems versions 1.1.1, 1.2.0 and 1.3.1 to update gems on my system. No way! It only says it's doing a bulk source update, eats all memory and does nothing. The longest I was waiting was 10 hours. Surely that's enough to update rails installation with dependencies and a couple of other gems on a 1Mb cable line? It seems I'll have to learn to live with manual gem downloads. So my question is: how do you live without rubygems when you have to? Has anyone any shell scripts that use awk or sed, tar and wget? I'm sure they would do a better job. I'm close to start writing one but maybe someone already got something like this.

Many thanks for any hints

Piotr

Are you sure it's not your firewall settings?

The only time I've run into anything similar is when my internet has either went *kaput* or a firewall setting at work stopped me from downloading any gems automatically. I would maybe check there first.

You can download the .gem files yourself and install them. Since rubygems 1.2 i've never had any problems, but prior versions were a bit problematic (especially on machines with not so much memory)

Fred

I got 512 MB. Maybe that's too little? I don't think it's the internet problem. I can download RubyGems.org | your community gem host (27 M) with wget in 3 min 46 s.

Piotr

I got 512 MB. Maybe that's too little? I don't think it's the internet problem. I can download RubyGems.org | your community gem host (27 M) with wget in 3 min 46 s.

You might well be under pressure with that much ram. I've never had
that problem since rubygems 1.2

Fred

So what RAM size would you recommend? If 512MB is too little another tool is really needed, at least for those on low memory VPSs.

Piotr

So what RAM size would you recommend? If 512MB is too little another tool is really needed, at least for those on low memory VPSs.

I don't honestly know, but what I was trying to say is that that
problem has gone away since rubygems 1.2. If you've still got that
problem then it's something else

What on earth could it be? Ruby version? Mine is 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [x86_64-linux] I tried again latest (1.3.1) version and it behaves the same. It slowly eats memory until about 80% and then starts swapping heavily. Maybe that's simply the way it's supposed to be nowadays and one can only add more RAM? Can you say how much RAM you got?

Piotr

It's a problem with your particular version of Rubygems. I just worked around it here. The amount of RAM you need for the bulk update depends on the amount of Gems you have installed.

The easy solution is to upgrade to 1.3.0 or higher where bulk updating no longer happens.

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/43984/rubygems-update-1.3.0.gem sudo gem install rubygems-update-1.3.0.gem sudo update_rubygems

Then to make sure you have the latest...

sudo gem update --system

Oh! What joy! It does work indeed! Many thanks for the solution.

P.