Big news for Ruby Gem maintainers: a few weeks ago GitHub stopped Gem building and announced it will only host existing Gems for another year. For alternatives for Gem hosting, the GitHub team pointed to GemCutter.
Now the teams behind GemCutter, Ruby Gems and RubyForge got together to make another big change in the Ruby ecosystem: replacing RubyForge. The announcement by Nick Quaranto explains the steps:
* 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.
The plans right now seem to be to slowly phase out RubyForge and all its services, as the announcement explains:
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.
Details and specific plans are still being drawn up and details need to be worked out. This discussion thread on the future of RubyForge gives more information, among others from Tom Copeland (the maintainer of RubyForge). Eg. Tom explains the possible fate of project-specific domains, ie. projectname.rubyforge.org:
Those virtual hosts will not be taken down right away... I suspect we'll put them in read-only mode in a few weeks, though. But we'll do tarballs of that and other stuff that's currently on RubyForge, and generally make it easy for folks to migrate away.
While upgrade and migration paths will be provided, at least for Gem hosting, all developers with projects and Gems on RubyForge need to keep an eye out for these changes. A Wiki Page tracking information about the RubyForge transition is available and is planned to contain the dates and other information once it becomes available.
Developers who use scripts to publish Gems to RubyForge will probably need to update their tool chains. GemCutter's tools for publishing Gems are very simple, though; releasing a Gem simply means executing gem push name.