unpacking a .gem?

[Martin Pirker]

Hi...

Short question: How do I manually unpack a .gem?

Long version:
Increasingly packages seem to only come as gem
download (e.g. mongrel). While nice and all if you are
properly setup and connected, you just gem install (and
there's an option "unpack an installed gem to the current
directory").

But what if for some reasons I just got hold of a single .gem
file and just want to
a) study its content first without install or
b) carefully install by hand into an enviroment which I
exactly want to know what gets in/out (no automatisms)


Thanks,
Martin

 

[Senthilnayagam]

Hi Martin,

Gem packing essentially is a zip file.

so rename it and unzip and do your research stuff.

this zip also has info on the gem plugin/app structure, author and
usage info


regards
A.Senthil Nayagam
http://senthilnayagam.com

 

[Martin Pirker]

Gem packing essentially is a zip file.

Ummm... it is indeed a plain .tar which aggregates a metadata.tar.gz
and a data.tar.gz

I suspected something like that already, but silly me got confused
why .tar.gz depacking didn't work - more than one wrapping, that's the
trick...

thanks
Martin