I second that. Gems are great and even though this whole rdoc, ri stuff is slow to build it is certainly not the dealbreaker in rubyland. When someone spends too much time with something like rubygems they tend to overestimate the importance of this or that feature. The importance of rubygems still working on the otherhand cannot be overestimated. When I try to get a company to accept ruby in lieu of PHP the last thing I need is installation upgrade nightmares with the sysadmin there because I can't figure out how to bring his server to run some library I use.