I always wondered what command i needed to find just the outdated gems. The fool that i am i never did “gem help commands“, but i’m wiser now. Found it in passing reading a mailing list post.
So basically the big reason for this is we’re developing on Windows (since we can’t afford the usual Apple laptops over in our office) and gem update usually fails if a gem doesnt have a WIN32 precompiled binary or something over at the rubygems source. It would be nice for the update to keep going, but until that happens i’m happy enough to update my gems manually but not blindly. “gem outdated” helps.
Just a note that sometimes, “gem outdated” reports on gems which are equal to the latest, dont know why but not something to worry about I hope (tell me in comments if i do). I’m ignoring this for now.
On a similar note, i sometimes need to explicitly mention the version i want, like for e.g. when installing eventmachine or json. for e.g. “gem install eventmachine --version=0.12.0“. The reason for that is simple, you need to find the highest version compatible with your operating system. Get out of your comfortable seat, head over to RubyForge or Github or whatever your gem sources are and check the latest version compatible for your operating system (let’s face it we’re talking Windows here only!).