= Announce: RubyGems Release 0.8.4

Hello and Happy New Year!  We've now surpassed 10,000 downloads of RubyGems and are starting to see a real rhythm of new gems being published.  Thanks to the efforts of many dedicated Rubyists, 2005 will be remembered as the year everything took shape in the world of ruby package distribution.

We have just released RubyGems 0.8.4. 0.8.4 is a small release, but it fixes some fairly major installation issues (thanks Ryan Davis) and addresses some speed issues with requires (thanks Eric Hodel, Gavin Sinclair, and Jim Weirich). 

== What is RubyGems?

RubyGems is a package management system for Ruby applications and
libraries.  RubyGems one command download makes installing Ruby
software fun and enjoyable again. (Ok, not really.)

Many gems are available for download from the RubyForge site.  Browse
the list of gems with a "gem list --remote" command and download what
you need with a simple "gem install <name-of-gem>".  RubyGems takes
care of the details of installing, not only the gem you requested, but
also any gems needed by the software you selected.

So now you are asking ...

== How can I get all this great stuff?

Well, here's how ...

To download and install:

1. DOWNLOAD FROM: http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126
2. UNPACK INTO A DIRECTORY AND CD THERE
3. INSTALL WITH:  ruby setup.rb all  (you may need admin/root privilege)

... or, if you have an existing RubyGem installation ....

  $ gem install rubygems-update  (again, might need to be admin/root)
  $ update_rubygems              (... here too)

I bet you are wondering...

== So What's Changed in this Release?

* Rubygems 0.8.3's installer was broken unless you already had an older version of RubyGems installed.  That's fixed.

* Change in the way Gem::Specification internally deals with lazy attributes and defaults, bringing (with some loadpath_manager changes) a fairly significant increase in speed.

* Support for lower-cased Gem file names (for you, Paul Duncan :)

* Erik Veenstra's patch for making Gem versions sortable.

Keep those gems coming!

-- Chad (for the RubyGems team)

