[mapgrep]

Indeed. I presume this is why Perl's package repository CPAN is actually a network of repositories ("Comprehensive Perl Archive Network"); Wikipedia says CPAN "is mirrored worldwide at more than 200 locations."

Does anyone know why rubygems does not work this way? I had always just assumed it did (due to the historical intertwining of Ruby and Perl communities).

[rmoriz]

The central architecture of rubygems allows you to publish and yank gems within minutes. CPAN takes some hours (and deletion may not be controlled).

Personally I'm a big fan of the CPAN approach as it is fairly simply. Just mirror via FTP. It's a nobrainer to setup and run a mirror.

That said, CPAN's master (PAUSE.cpan.org) is a SPOF as well.

What I like is that not a single party is responsible for paying server bills + maintaining the platform. Ruby Central and the team of volunteers do a great job, but in the end, people only care when something breaks.

Instead every big company/university that profits from the Ruby ecosystem should imho run a public rubygems mirror as a contribution to the open source world. That's common practice for other projects, too. Think of all mirrors of the Linux distributions, kernel.org, cpan, python etc.

=> http://slideshare.net/rmoriz/rubygems-behind-the-gems

I also want to mention, that ftp.ruby-lang.org is a single homed box. There is no other official mirror of the MRI/C-Ruby source that can be used as failover or load balancer. This is bad, too.

[themgt]

Agreed. We've looked into running our own mirrors for rubygems and it's there's nothing really supported out there. The addition of git gems in bundler means you'd really need a git mirror tool as well.

[jim-greer]

At Kongregate we just check the gems into our repo under vendor/cache and then run 'bundler install --local' at deploy time.

Here's the docs that describe it:

"While installing gems, Bundler will check vendor/cache and then your system's gems."<and then tries to fetch remotely unless you pass --local>

http://gembundler.com/v1.2/bundle_install.html

[phillmv]

If I had to guess, I would wager it's because it's expensive and hard. Plus there's the fortunate coincidence that - as far as I recall - rubygems has mostly Just Worked Fine, Thank You Very Much™ .

(I miss the days from when github also hosted a gem repository…)

Solving the authenticity problem alone is probably not fun – tho obviously there is much to be learned from CPAN. Given recent problems there will probably be enough political will to make this happen in the future, though.