After a recent reinstallation of Ubuntu, I reinstalled RubyGems. The Ubuntu repository grabbed version 1.3.5. Later I found I need the latest version. So I installed the RubyGems update to get to version 1.3.7.
The trouble is, upon upgrading gem list returns only a small subset of all my originally installed gems. In the past, I've solved this by reinstalling all my gems following an upgrade, but this is troublesome and I hope to avoid this workaround now and in the future.
I tried adding an export GEM_HOME to my .bashrc file. It didn't work. gem list still doesn't list all my gems (even though I can find them on my computer in /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems. I also created a .gemrc yaml file and set the gemhome path. When I run gem env I can see that the home path is set, but still gem list doesn't return everything.
What's up with this?
This won't directly answer your question, but a lot of us use rvm to manage Ruby and gems. The benefit is it doesn't require us to mess with the system's Ruby installation and gems, leaving those alone for any OS routines needing a particular version of Ruby or a gem.
Since switching to rvm I've quit installing an updated version in /usr/bin/local too as rvm makes it so easy to keep my development versions separate from the system.
There are great reasons to tweak the system gems so I won't question why you might do so. I'm just tossing out the rvm thang as it might help solve your needs.