I have been using Ruby for about two years now/ I have used various Gems throughout those years. I recently decided to look at more than just the popular gems out of curiosity. Sort of to see what is out there and what people are creating. While doing this I noticed that there is a lot of really crappy gems. Not only are there a lot of really crappy gems but some of them literally don’t do anything. They are just a stub when you run gem create [gemname]. I got to thinking why hasn’t Ruby put some system in place to verify that one the gems actually do something but two that they have some quality.

I feel that to fix this problem they need to implement  a rating system so if your gem gets voted down to much it should be removed. That name would then become available for others to use. A comparison I would make to this is the Android market. They have structure in place that at least makes you be semi serious about developing a good application. First you have to pay a fee to publish to the market. Now for Ruby gems that may not work because there is no profit being made off of these gems. More that Ruby gems needs to come up with some criteria that defines you to have the ability to create these gems. At the end of the day I’m sure it doesn’t matter that much but it’s annoying searching through a bunch of crap gems just to get to what you want. When you have been doing it long enough though you tend to know what are good gems and which ones are a waste of time.