My understanding of it:
Gems is a packaging mechanism (similar to PPMs in a way; gems may contain extension code that's compiled on the installing system, or binaries for Win32, or pure Ruby code). rubyforge.org is a Ruby-oriented Sourceforge-y site and the default source for gems (similar to how AS provides the default PPM repository), but the gem utility may be pointed at other servers (for beta releases, private repositories, etc). RAA provides a general index of Ruby projects with pointers to where they live (so similar to CPAN but nothing's really available directly from it; you get pointed to rubyforge or the author's site).
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A list of links to projects isn't very similar to CPAN at all. CPAN is a distributed archive network with sophisticated automatic indexing, which is both more useful and much more complicated than a simple list of links. There's a good reason that no other language has anything close to the size and scope of CPAN - it's a heck of a lot of work to create and maintain! Worse, it requires a massive social effort to get everyone to actually use the same system.
-sam
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True, to be pedantic (and I'm not one to shirk from pedantry :) functionally it's more akin to Freshmeat than CPAN. In purpose it's similar to CPAN in that it provides a single index point. And yes, it's only a rough parallel.
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I in my innocence remain clueless! What I've seen to date suggests that RAA == CPAN, but since I'm very new to the scene in question, I just don't know.
--hsm
"Never try to teach a pig to sing...it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."
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Why, it's the Recreational Aircraft Association!! What else could it be? O:-)
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And just in time for the new 'fly by wireless' technology!
--hsm
"Never try to teach a pig to sing...it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."
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