RubyGems 1.0 Released, Helps Windows Developers

UPDATE: Make that RubyGems 1.0.1, released tonight.

The great folks at the RubyGems project have released RubyGems 1.0.  This release fixes a bunch of issues, including some important ones for Windows developers.  Updates include:

Major New Features Include:

• RubyGems warns about various problems with gemspecs during gem building
• More-consistent versioning for the RubyGems software

Other Changes Include:

• Fixed various bugs and problems with installing gems on Windows
• Fixed using gem server for installing gems
• Various operations are even more verbose with?verbose
• Built gems are now backwards compatible with 0.9.4
• Improved detection of RUBYOPT loading rubygems
• ruby setup.rb now has a?help option
• Gem::Specification#bindir is now respected on installation
• Executable stubs can now be installed to match ruby?s name, so if ruby is installed as ?ruby18?, foo_exec will be installed as ?foo_exec18?
• gem unpack can now unpack into a specific directory with?target
• OpenSSL is no longer required by default

Deprecations and Deletions:

• Kernel#require_gem has been removed
• Executables without a shebang will not be wrapped in a future version, this may cause such executables to fail to operate on installation
• Gem::Platform constants other than RUBY and CURRENT have been removed
• Gem::RemoteInstaller was removed
• Gem::Specification#test_suite_file and #test_suite_file= are deprecated in favor of #test_file and #test_file=
• Gem::Specification#autorequire= has been deprecated
• Time::today will be removed in a future version

It’s pretty simple to update your current RubyGems installation, simply type:

gem update --system

The upcoming release of Instant Rails 2.0 will include this new version of RubyGems, primarily because of the issues 0.95 users experienced on Windows.  Please read the official announcement on this RubyGems release which will help with other ways to update or install RubyGems on your system.