(Source: Mauricio Fernandez)

 The Ruby Production Archive (RPA) will provide packages of Ruby
 libraries and programs in a form that allows production use, engineered
 through a stringent process resembling FreeBSD's or Debian's.

 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA. Its scope and
 purposes are different to those of other systems like RubyGems.

 rpa-base 0.1.0 is now available on http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org .
 Please keep in mind that this is *not* a RPA release (that is, a release
 of the repository) but just a release of the rpa-base tool itself. We
 have provided several sample ports/packages for testing purposes, but
 they don't formally belong to RPA. Read below for information on the
 libs/apps packaged so far.

 rpa-base requires Ruby 1.8.1 (certainly 1.8 at least, it might work on
 1.8.0); it has been tested on several Linux distributions, FreeBSD and
 win32. We would appreciate feedback (both positive and negative) under
 those or any other architecture.

 It takes but a couple minutes to install and will allow you to do

 rpa install instiki ruvi

 ;-)
 (NOTE: ruvi, the cool pure-Ruby vim clone, won't work on win32)

 Features
 ========

 rpa-base is a port/package manager designed to support RPA's client-side
 package management. You can think of it as RPA's apt-get + dpkg. It
 features the following (working right now):

  * sane dependency management: rpa-base installs dependencies as needed,
    keeps track of reverse dependencies on uninstall, and will remove no
    longer needed dependencies
  * atomic (de)installs: operations on the local RPA installation are atomic
    transactions; the system has been designed to survive ruby crashes (OS
    crashes too on POSIX systems)
  * modular, extensible design: the 2-phase install is similar to FreeBSD and
    Debian's package creation; rpa-base packages need not be restricted
    to installing everything under a single directory ("1 package, 1 dir"
    paradigm)
  * rdoc integration: RDoc documentation for libraries is generated at install
    time (currently disabled on win32)
  * ri integration: ri data files are generated for all the libraries managed
    by RPA; you can access this information with ri-rpa (currently disabled on
    win32)
  * handling C extensions: if you have the required C toolchain, rpa-base can
    compile extensions as needed
  * unit testing: when a library is installed, its unit tests are run; the
    installation is canceled if they don't pass