Problem installing gems

ruby-talk
1

I am having a strange problem on one of my desktop machines trying to
update the list of rubygems, or indeed, to install any remote gems.
When I try to execute the command: "gem update -r" on the machine, I get
the following message:

    Upgrading installed gems...
    Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org

and it freezes there forever.

One other interesting fact that might be useful is that wget also fails
on this desktop as well. It times out on *sending* the http request.
Granted, I know this fact might make this problem non ruby specific but
I think it only started happening after I installed ruby on cygwin. I
also installed Ruby with the windows installer. I tried to remove
cygwin and reinstall it... all to no avail.

I'd really like to do some development on this machine, so any help is
appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Robert Isaacs

2

Robert Isaacs said:
[...]

I get the following message:

    Upgrading installed gems...
    Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org

and it freezes there forever.

One other interesting fact that might be useful is that wget also fails
on this desktop as well. It times out on *sending* the http request.

Hmmm ... what is the proxy situation on that particular box? Browsers
tend to pick up the proxy configuration automatically, but many tools
(perhaps including wget) need a http_proxy environment variable set.

···

--
-- Jim Weirich jim@weirichhouse.org http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)