Gem Documentation Doesn't seem to help with use of modified localgem installations

[Xeno Campanoli]

Say, I am working to try modifying a gem I have partly installed, locally, but
the gem documents don't help me, so far, to learn how to look up and run things.
I can see from the README how to reinstall from inside the source directory,
but here are some questions:

1. Is it possible to look up older versions of the gem, that might work, from
the repository, so that I could install one of them using --version ?

2. Is there a gem option to install from a local gem directory so that this
could be done without the SA shell commands, but rather with a canonical "gem"
sequence to do the ruby extconf.rb;make;make install

?

xc

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

1. Is it possible to look up older versions of the gem, that might work,
from the repository, so that I could install one of them using --version ?

gem help search yields:
-a or --all to search for all versions of a given gem.

PS C:\Users\CynicalRyan> gem search nokogiri -ar

*** REMOTE GEMS ***

nokogiri (1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.3, 1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.3.0, 1.2.3, 1.2.2, 1.2.1,
1.2.0, 1.1.1, 1.1.0, 1.0.7, 1.0.6, 1.0.5, 1.0.4
, 1.0.3, 1.0.2, 1.0.1, 1.0.0)
superfeedr-nokogiri (1.4.0.20091116183308)

2. Is there a gem option to install from a local gem directory so that
this could be done without the SA shell commands, but rather with a
canonical "gem" sequence to do the ruby extconf.rb;make;make install

If by "local gem directory" you mean a directory containing gems you
downloaded, then yes. Just type "gem install <gemname>-<version>.gem",
and RubyGems does its thing.

You cannot skip compiling, however, if that is a necessary step, as far
as I am aware of.