| 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. |