I have a Ruby application (not using Rails) that use my own Ruby gems. I have these gems hosted on a local gem repository server. Some of these gems have dependencies on other publicly available gems from gemcutter (ex: haml, curb).
Would it make sense to vendor/mirror these publicly available gems on my local gem server so that I would only have a single gem repository to get my gems from? Are there any major drawbacks as long as I have the required versions that my gems depend on?
Is it possible or has it ever happened where a user has removed their gem from gemcutter and not made it available anymore? I assume that having these gems in my own repository would prevent that from happening as I would already have a copy of the required gems.
You could host your own gems on your own personal gem server, just obviously you accept responsibility for maintaining it.
As for people removing gems from Gemcutter, the API doesn’t support removing yet, but will soon. We’ll be putting measures in place to ensure a mass-deletion of gems doesn’t impact the community as a whole. Also, gem mirrors comb the site daily so the chances of really losing any code is pretty small.